CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  "A tumor?" Jake asked.

  "No," George said. "Tumors are out-of-control growths. This was very precise, affecting what seems to be a carefully delineated area of the brain. Also, since all the Furs in the four eastern villages act exactly the same way, indifferent and passive, I'm guessing that all their brains would have this same blanked-out area. Tumors don't do that; every growth is out of control in its own way. A better guess is some sort of virus, or virus-analogue, that destroyed this section of the brain and only this section and then self-destructed."

  Shipley said quietly, "Microorganisms aren't usually that specific."

  "No," Ingrid said. "Not unless they've been very skillfully engineered."

  Engineered. The word shimmered in the air like a cloud of deadly gas.

  Maggie Striker, the ecologist, frowned. "Let me test my understanding here, George. You think a virus infected the four villages of the passive Furs, making them passive, but never reached the Furs in Cheyenne territory. And you think the virus was deliberately created to do exactly what it did, to only that particular group."

  George flung his hands wide. "How would I know for sure? I'm only offering one hypothesis that fits the facts. If anyone has a better hypothesis, I'm eager to hear it."

  Silence. Apparently no one had a better hypothesis. Finally Lucy said timidly, "Couldn't the virus have evolved by itself to attack that section of the brain? Without somebody's engineering it?"

  "Again, how do I know?" George said.

  Ingrid added, "It doesn't seem likely."

  Jake didn't see why not, but this wasn't his field. He struggled to assimilate everything. "So you're saying some advanced civilization brought the Furs here from somewhere else, and then maybe infected just one group of them?"

  Thekla, the agriculturist, had been listening avidly. Now she said, "Before anyone answers that, there's something I want you all to see. A recording. Two recordings, actually. Gail?"

  "Go ahead," Gail said. She did not look happy.

  Thekla said, "This first recording came from Captain Scherer. He's still section-mapping Greentrees from space, of course, and when his satellites picked up this, he did a low flyover himself. He gave this to Gail last night. Computer, on. Show file 4593."

  The wallscreen brightened. Jake saw a space recording, already translated from the digital, of piles of ... something. Small dots sat motionless between them. Abruptly the recording changed to highest resolution at low altitude. The "somethings" were thatched huts, and the motionless dots were Furs, somewhere in a mountainous setting.

  A third group of aliens on Greentrees.

  Each Fur sat on the ground beside dead cookfires. These Furs were very thin, and their hair had fallen out in scruffy patches. But what surprised Jake the most was their faces. Even through the reddish-brown fur and alien features, one could see that these Furs were expressing some other emotion than had the Furs in the passive villages. Eyes and mouths were both wide open, exposing the impressive teeth. And the eyes ... they reminded Jake of something, but he couldn't quite say what. As he watched, one Fur rose, staggered in irregular circles, and fell down again.

  "Are they sick?" Todd asked.

  Thekla said, "I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. Now, this second recording was made by one of my techs in the ag lab. They've all been working hard, and they're young, and ... well, you'll see."

  The screen brightened to show a young woman with glossy black hair, sitting cross-legged on the lab floor and staring at a shoe. She raised her head and looked at the camera. Her pupils were highly dilated, and on her face shone a look of such awe, such innocent miraculous wonderment, that Jake knew instantly what he was seeing.

  Thekla said dryly, "There has never been an Earthly human culture, except the Eskimos, that didn't eventually discover at least one psychotropic plant and make use of it. This one is a genemod version of some wildflower the kids are calling 'highgreen.' They tested it first on poor Fluffers, but she doesn't seem to mind."

  The camera angle broadened. Now the screen included a cat, one of the several dozen domestic animals brought from Earth. Most were still in cold sleep, but Jake knew the ag and genetics labs had awakened some, cats and dogs and goats to use as test subjects in developing feed that would flourish on Greentrees. The cat staggered in circles and then fell down. A close-up of its face showed a feline version of the same ecstasy that lit up the girl's.

  Thekla said, "The recording was made by her lab mate, as a joke. I came across it in the computer and gave them hell. It's too dangerous at this stage of our work to be trying substances on humans, and we can't recklessly risk our limited number of test animals, either. But neither Fluffers nor Kendra suffered any damage, so my guess is that we won't be able to suppress highgreen even if we tried."

  George said, "Now that the cat is out of the bag," and despite himself, Jake laughed. Lucy looked at him fondly. Jake suddenly wondered what Shipley made of all this. New Quakers didn't use fizzies or even caffeine. Did Shipley realize that most of the religions since the beginning of time, from the Rig Veda through Islam and the Great Spirit, had used chemical enhancements to reach mysticism? Of course he did.

  Maggie said, "So the third group of Furs are using some sort of psychotropic drug. What does that tell us?"

  "If that's what they're actually doing, nothing," Thekla said. "But in light of what George found, I'm wondering if there isn't something going on in these creatures' brains that's producing the same effect, continuously. Look at them—they're not just having a good time and then going back to their lives. They're not eating. Their bodies are neglected. The thatch is falling off their roofs. The cook-fires are all out. Maybe something has lodged in their brains to cause altered consciousness all the time, so that each generation gets worse and slips farther backward in technology and civilization."

  Lucy said slowly, "Something created, you mean. Genemod. Like the virus making the other Furs passive."

  George said, "We need one of those brains!"

  "Well, we haven't got one," Gail said acidly, "and nobody's going to start another war to get one."

  Nods around the table. Larry Smith—"Blue Waters"—had not comlinked about his "war" with the Furs. Scherer's satellite surveillance had not caught any bellicose activity, either. No one knew what was happening on the Cheyenne subcontinent, if anything, unless Nan Frayne had comlinked to her father. If so, Jake hadn't been told about it.

  Maggie said thoughtfully, "Posit for a minute that the sky-high Furs are victims of another genemod virus-analog. What do we have? Some unknown entity brought three groups of Furs here and set them down about a thousand years ago in widely separated areas. Then, maybe at some later time, that entity, or maybe a different one, released different Viruses' in each group to affect their brains, making one passive and one aggressive and one permanently high—" Her eyes widened.

  "You're describing an experiment," Ingrid said flatly. "With the entire planet as a Petri dish."

  "My God," George said. "If—" He didn't finish.

  Jake sat back, staggered. A planet-wide biological experiment stretched over a thousand years. More ... you'd need ship time to get to Greentrees from wherever the Furs had come. What sort of beings...

  "I don't like this," Maggie said. After a moment she added, "And I don't believe it."

  "Why not?" Ingrid demanded.

  "Occam's razor," Maggie said. "The simplest explanation that fits the facts is that the Furs evolved here in some weird evolutionary path."

  Lucy said, her small fists clenched, "They did not evolve here!"

  "Maybe not on this continent," Maggie said, "but on Greentrees. That would make sense; we haven't examined the other continents closely. Then these Furs came here and contracted some sort of virus they weren't immune to—"

  "Three different viruses?" Ingrid said scornfully. "I don't believe it. Those viruses were genetically engineered to produce three different effects."

  "Engineered by whom?" Ja
ke said.

  "How should I know? More advanced members of their own species. Or another species entirely."

  Jake said, "If other continents on Greentrees had populations with that level of technology, Scherer would have detected them in his mapping expeditions. Hell, you wouldn't even need low flyovers—there'd be thermal signatures and such that our orbital probes would pick up."

  This was unarguable; no one spoke for a moment. Then Robert Takai said quietly, "If Ingrid is right in her genetics—"

  "I am!"

  "—then someone is running an experiment here on Greentrees. A giant Petri dish. The most Occam-razor explanation for that, Maggie, is members of their own species who planted them here from some other planet."

  "Nonsense," Thekla snapped, her sharp British clip enraging Ingrid further.

  "I'm telling you—"

  "—ridiculous idea that—"

  "—Lucy's fossil record—"

  "—Stupid reasoning from—"

  "Stop!" Jake said. And then, more quietly, "Wait."

  He surveyed them impassively; at least, he hoped he looked impassive. His stomach hurt. "Let me summarize what we've got so far. These are facts. There is no fossil record of the Furs in this area. The three Fur groups show three distinctly different sets of behavior. We're fairly certain the ubiquitous behavior in each group has been brought about by alterations to the brain, and we believe this was done by some sort of viral analog. All three groups have backslid in civilization and appear to be dying out, but for different behavioral reasons. Can we all agree on these facts?"

  One by one, the thirteen people facing him nodded. So far, so good. Jake wasn't under any illusion that the consensus would last.

  "All right. Now, the Furs might lack a fossil record either because they came from somewhere else on Greentrees or were brought here by someone. The brain tamperings might be deliberate or they might be natural, since after all these are aliens. The—"

  "The tamperings aren't natural!" Ingrid said. Her face was red. Jake held up his hand, palm outward.

  "Just wait a bit, Ingrid. Please. Now, if you put those varying interpretations of our agreed-on facts all together, you get four possibilities.

  "One: the Furs came to this area from some other, equally primitive area of Greentrees and contracted disease or diseases that are killing off their species, so that we're looking at the tail end of natural evolution."

  Maggie nodded vigorously. "Yes. Like Neanderthals. That makes sense."

  Roy Callipare, the geologist, said, "I think so, too. Those drunken Furs don't even need a fancy virus to account for their state— they're just using the equivalent of opium or peyote, and using it badly." Thekla also nodded, looking justified.

  "—Two," Jake continued, before Ingrid could attack Roy, "the Furs came from off-planet but contracted the viruses naturally. The Furs came here voluntarily, just as we did, to colonize. Then the colony or colonies were attacked by viruses over the last thousand years, and this pathetic remnant is what's left."

  "Oh, God, not the 'lost space colony' scenario," Ingrid said. "How many bad vids has that spawned?"

  "No, if makes sense," Liu Fengmo said, surprising Jake. "Why should the Furs not come to colonize and then degenerate?"

  Lucy said, "Because there are no artifacts from when they were not degenerate!"

  "Not near here," Fengmo said thoughtfully, "but on other continents, maybe. No thermal signature would be detected from deserted technology or cities half buried under vegetation. I believe this."

  "And I," said Faisal and Robert, almost simultaneously. Robert quickly added, "Or maybe they developed a way to detect the virus, and the healthy Furs left, taking all of their technology with them."

  William Shipley nodded slowly, then shook his head. Jake didn't stop to figure out what that might mean.

  "A third combination of facts: the Furs' brains have been deliberately tampered with. That implies that they were brought here from somewhere by someone, since we've all agreed that Greentrees doesn't hold a civilization sophisticated enough to genetically engineer targeted viruses. So this means that the Furs were genetically modified either before or after being dumped here by—"

  "Why?" Robert demanded.

  "We don't know that," Jake said patiently. "Maybe it's a penal planet of sorts."

  "Too expensive to use a whole different planet," Robert said. "Interstellar energy costs are huge, Jake."

  "I know. I'm just tossing out possibilities. Maybe Ingrid is right and it's some sort of biological experiment to—"

  "Thanks for that, anyway," Ingrid muttered.

  "—improve their race, or do some radical social experiment, or punish some equivalent of families or clans ... we can't possibly know."

  "That's true," George said. "But I think—"

  "Just a minute, George," Jake said. God, it was like herding cats. "There's just one more possibility, however remote. The Furs were brought here and tampered with by some other race. If there can be one unknown sentient species in space, there can be more than one."

  There. He'd succeeded in setting forth all combinations of the facts, even if the last one, manipulative über-aliens, sounded completely ridiculous even to himself.

  Ingrid said, "I go for Jake's third or fourth theory. These Furs were brought here from someplace else and genetically modified. I don't know who did it, or why, but this is not a natural phenomenon. It's not."

  "I agree," said Todd, loyal husband, with a glance at Ingrid that fairly begged for approval. He didn't get it.

  "I agree, too," Lucy said. She didn't look pleased, Jake thought, to find herself on Ingrid's team, but her tone was firm. "Jake ... what do you think?"

  He said slowly, "I don't know yet."

  Scherer surprised them all. "I know how I think. If someone— if anyone—brings the Furs here for the experiment, they come back. To see how the experiment goes. Maybe they come back soon. We must be prepared."

  "Oh, God," Gail said, "this is getting way out of hand. If who comes back? We're not going to divert Mira City's resources into preparing for invasion by some hypothetical über-aliens who probably don't even exist!"

  A half-dozen voices clamored at once. Ingrid won out. "Just because Greentrees might be a petri dish doesn't mean that we're in danger!"

  "It doesn't mean we're not," Roy said soberly.

  Shipley, very pale, said, "Let us suppose that if this is an experiment, the experimenters do return. What would be best is to prepare some plans to meet them, a protocol that will welcome them without arousing anger. These are fellow beings, with souls of their own."

  Shipley was the worst person to have said that, Jake instantly realized. Because the suggestion came from the New Quaker, everyone visioned some sort of quasi-religious, pacifistic evangelizing, and everyone immediately wanted nothing to do with it.

  George said, "Even if the Furs were an experiment, that's no guarantee the experiment is still in progress. Look how few Furs are left, how primitive and degenerate they are. I don't think anyone's been to check up on them for hundreds of years."

  "That's because they're a lost colony," Liu Fengmo said. "If we become diseased and degenerate, no one from Earth may ever know it, either."

  Jake thought of the nonexistent quee transmissions from the Phoenix.

  "I think Fengmo is right," Robert said. "This is a lost colony, or an isolated and dying remnant of a native species on the way out. Whatever they are, they're no threat to us. We have far too much to do to create our own life here to devote too much effort to the mystery surrounding the Furs."

  George burst out, "How can you say that about the only other sentient species we've ever found in the universe?"

  Gail said decisively, "I think Robert's approach is the only sensible thing that's been said here all morning. We can study the Furs, but basically we just have to wait and see what information turns up about them. Or doesn't turn up. Meanwhile, Mira City comes first."

  "Wait and se
e," Fengmo said slowly. "Yes."

  "Nein!" Scherer said. "We must prepare to defend ourselves!"

  Jake saw that his militarism was as unwelcome as Shipley's religion. And as easily dismissed: Scherer was a soldier, therefore he would naturally anticipate war. Robert Takai said, not troubling to keep the disbelief from his voice, "How would we prepare against aliens that use star systems as test tubes? How the hell would we fight them?"

  Scherer didn't answer quickly enough. Jake felt the group solidifying against Scherer. They might argue—would argue, fiercely and endlessly—over the Furs' origins. That debate was not going to disappear. But they were scientists and administrators. Their basic attitude was going to be wait-and-see on anything more than talk.

  "It's bad science," George Fox said, "to assume we know enough to proceed with any action. We don't, really. Not yet. We need more facts."

  "Yes," everyone said in various ways, and Jake found that he, too, agreed. They just didn't have enough information for a solid conclusion. The mystery was not solved.

  Maybe it never would be. In some ways, that was the most disquieting idea of all.

  He and Lucy discussed it later and, to his surprise, she was not content with doing nothing.

  "It's not paranoia," she told Jake. "It's not. I'm a paleontologist. I know the Furs didn't evolve anywhere on Greentrees, and they didn't come here in some crashed spaceship and then dwindle precipitously in numbers, either. They—"

  He said gently, "You haven't examined all of Greentrees, Lucy. Only a few limited sites."

  "I ran computer simulations—Jake, it bothers me that you don't believe me. It feels like you're questioning my professional competence."

  She was always so direct. Like Donnie. "I'm not doing that, Lucy."

  "My sanity, then. Or at least my mental stability."

  He took a second too long to answer. She stiffened and walked away.