CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  At first no one but Shipley heard him. George went on talking about the observed properties of the bioarm, interrupted often by Ingrid. Shipley said to Karim, "What isn't theirs?"

  "The shuttle," Karim said and this time he raised his voice. "The shuttle doesn't belong to the Vines. It's not theirs."

  Jake turned slowly to stare at Karim.

  Shipley said, "Whose is it?"

  Karim shrugged. "I can't tell that. How could I know? But the inside is not configured for them. There are seats, molded up from the floor and not removable. What would the Vines need with seats? And the control console is too tall for their height. They've built a step up to it, and they've built little racks to hold their carts while they're inside, but both are alterations to the original hull, built out of different materials."

  He had the total attention of the entire camp.

  "There's a slime coating over the entire inside, but it doesn't cover the controls. I didn't get to see the engine, of course, but what I could deduce about it from guessing at the controls just doesn't seem ... right for Vines."

  George said urgently, "Karim, what do the molded seats look like?"

  Karim made a vague shape in the air.

  "I mean," George said even more urgently, "do they seem made for a bipedal creature not quite our height with a place for a thick powerful tail?"

  Shipley saw immediately what George meant. It made him a little dizzy.

  "Yes!" Karim said. "I didn't realize it ... but those seats would fit Furs perfectly! So would the height of the control console! It's a Fur ship!"

  "Or was," Ingrid said.

  Shipley caught sight of Naomi. His daughter stood very still, and he felt the conflict within her. She had championed the Furs. She was fascinated by the Vines. The two were at war, and the Vines may have taken over a Fur ship, but not one built by any Furs on Greentrees.

  She looked straight at him and snapped, as if the interstellar war were his fault, "Get away from me!"

  He didn't move. After a moment Naomi did, to the other side of George, who was so caught up in theorizing that he hadn't noticed the exchange between father and daughter.

  "If the Vines are telling the truth," George said, "then they've been at war with the original Furs for millennia. Time dilation at a huge fraction of c would make that possible, wouldn't it, Karim? Especially since that drive you mentioned, what did you call it—"

  "The McAndrew Drive," Karim said. "Yes, it would let them accelerate and decelerate really fast, so the shipboard time would be very small compared to the lapsed time on their two planets. Or on Greentrees."

  "So the Vines have a bio-based technology," George rushed on, "and the Furs have physics-based tech. Like this shuttle. And if they're at war with each other..." He seemed to run out of statement.

  Lucy said, "There's never been an historical case where a lesser technology defeated a greater one for very long."

  Ingrid said, "But which here is 'greater'? Biotech or physics tech? We don't know enough about either one, as these aliens practice it, to decide."

  Shipley said quietly, "It also depends on your definitions of 'great' and 'defeat.'" No one heard him.

  Karim tried to say something, but Ingrid was louder. She said, "The Vines said they made the Furs on Greentrees. I think they mean it literally. They created several groups of Furs in different colonies, and then—"

  Naomi said angrily, "How could anyone 'create' entire adult members of a species not even based on the same gene stuff?"

  Ingrid ignored Naomi, the nonscientist. "—and then the Vines altered each colony differently. One colony was made incurious and inadaptable. One made permanently intoxicated. The Cheyenne-territory colony made, I don't know, maybe—"

  Lucy said, "A controlled experiment. But why?"

  Jake said, "To find a bioweapon that would incapacitate the Furs on their home planet."

  "And also—" Karim began. Naomi cut him off, snarling, "That's dumb. Why not just kill the Furs on the Fur home planet?"

  No one spoke. Into the silence Shipley said wearily, "Because they don't practice killing."

  His daughter turned on him. "They're not fucking Quakers. Dad! Keep your anachronistic religion out of this!"

  "No," Jake said, "Dr. Shipley's right. Look at the evidence. We blew up the Vine ship. They didn't blow up ours in retaliation. We killed the first one of them off the shuttle. They didn't fire back. We—"

  Ingrid demanded, "How do you know they even have weapons?"

  Karim said, "They have weapons. Also, they—"

  George said, "There's no species I know of that doesn't have some defensive measures, even if it's running away. Of course, that's Terran animal species, which these are not. Although plant defenses—"

  Ingrid said, "I'm still bothered by the idea that the Vines could create an adult society of Furs without—"

  Karim shouted, "Will you listen to me!"

  Everyone stared. Karim, the polite young Arab and junior scientist, never yelled. He said, "I keep trying to tell you. The Vines said to me during my shuttle inspection that tomorrow they're going to the Fur colonies on Greentrees. They invited us to come along. They're perfectly willing to explain what they're doing, I think. After all, they've explained everything else we've wanted to know.

  "All we have to do is ask."

  An alien, plantlike society that practiced nonviolence.

  That's what Shipley had said to Jake. But it wasn't really true, was it? If everything speculated about in camp this evening was true, Shipley thought, then the Vines practiced a kind of violence equally as horrifying as the rebuilts' kind. Rebuilts manipulated genes, the stuff of life, to create living sources of spare parts. Vines manipulated genes to create ways of destroying their enemies' brains, rendering them so passive they couldn't even care for themselves. How nonviolent was that?

  Shipley couldn't sleep. He'd crept out of the inflatable somewhere between midnight and dawn, leaving the others breathing deeply after hours of excited talk. Lucy Lasky was on guard duty. She nodded to him but asked him no questions, for which he was grateful. Gail or Ingrid would have told him to go back to bed, or stay in camp, or otherwise remain where, even asleep, he couldn't escape human noise. Chatter. Snoring. Crying out in nightmares Shipley didn't want to know about.

  He walked away from camp, avoiding the directions of both the shuttle and the small inflatable occupied by Naomi and Gail. It wasn't really dark; two moons and a glory of stars shone in a clear sky, and the light signal continued to flash from the top of the tower, beacon to any Vines that might be left in the mother ship. Although Karim had said it was small for an interstellar ship, that living pod bulging from its stick above the high-density disk. These four—now three—Vines might be all that the ship had contained.

  Shipley didn't want to think about what Karim had said, what any of them had said. He wanted silence.

  The purple groundcover, ghostly silver by moonlight, wasn't broken by boulders or fallen logs. Shipley had brought an inflatable stool with him, so lightweight he hardly noticed carrying it but strong enough to support his bulk. He inflated it and sat down heavily, facing away from camp. Something small scurried away from him in the groundcover. He ignored it; his boots were practically impenetrable. The sweet night scent of Greentrees wafted around him.

  Truth, simplicity, silence, conscience. Those were the New Quaker tenets. "The truth shall make you free," the Bible said, and it was right: truth set one free from deception, meaninglessness, emptiness, egocentricity. The truth was the best that was in each person, the inner light that could blossom into joy. The New Quakers had departed from Earth because there seemed no Terran society left that didn't value lies, image, scams, celebrity, and cynicism over truth.

  So why was he having such a hard time hearing the truth inside him?

  The Vines had deliberately refused the chance to kill humans in retaliation for the killing that had been done to them. They had answered, as far as Shipley coul
d judge, every question the humans asked with openness and truth. They had demonstrated, as finely as any Quaker in history had ever done, that it was possible to offer to aggressors a potent nonviolence and so turn them into allies. It was as if the Vines had read the George Fox of six hundred years ago: "Take away the occasion of war." Shipley couldn't imagine a more eloquent peace testimony than the ones these strange aliens had offered humans.

  And yet they were at war with the Furs. Hadn't the Vines offered the Furs the same nonviolence as they'd offered to humans? Perhaps they had, and the Furs had refused to respond, redoubling their own attacks. If those space Furs were anything like the ones that Naomi had stayed with near Larry Smith's Cheyenne, Shipley could believe it.

  A truly nonviolent group would then have refused to retaliate, even if it meant death. Better death than participating in evil. But the Vines had, apparently, not reacted that way. Instead they had brought DNA samples of Furs, or Fur embryos, or something, to this remote planet, had engineered multiple colonies of Furs, and had begun experimenting on them, using living beings with the same cold-blooded lack of regard that Franz Mueller had expressed for his murdered clone.

  Was any of this even true? It was the result, after all, of the Vines' word—if "word" was the correct term—combined with theorizing by George, Ingrid, and Lucy.

  On the other hand, the theory fit Occam's razor: it was the simplest explanation that was consistent with observed fact and didn't leave out any facts.

  Simplest? A plant-run controlled experiment in eugenic horror on an alien planet—that was the simplest explanation?

  Shipley put his hand on his chest. Lately he could feel his heart skip beats, despite the mechanical regulator. It hadn't done that on Earth seven years ago, seventy years ago. He slapped another patch on his neck and his chest quieted. Still, no organ lasted forever, no matter how you conserved it. You could only replace it, like Franz had—

  He was going around and around in unproductive circles. So he stopped thinking and let the silence of the night fill him. Gradually, his agitated mind calmed. Shipley sat there a long time, until his legs were stiff and his truth came to him somewhere before the brightening dawn.

  It wasn't a large truth. No great light shining on the problems of the Vines, or the Furs, or Naomi, or Franz. But Shipley was grateful for the knowledge that did come to him, because it said clearly what he must do. There was no greater blessing than to know you were acting in accordance with right.

  It was right for him to go with the Vines to each Fur colony. He would be needed. He didn't know for what, but he would be needed. His part in this—whatever "this" actually was—was not yet over.

  At peace, Shipley lumbered to his feet. He stretched, feeling his old bones creak, and started back to the sleeping camp.

  19

  Gail said, "You're very hard on your father," and immediately regretted it. Now they would have yet another fight, and they'd already had two in as many days. Neither woman was the type to back down.

  But Nan only rolled over on her belly and said, "Let me tell you a story from when I was a kid."

  Gail squinted at her in the dim light. It was sometime after midnight, but they had left the screened top of the inflatable open and cool starlight turned everything silver. Gail, chilly after the heat of lovemaking had worn off, lay wrapped in a blanket. Nan, who never seemed to get cold or hot or hungry or tired, lay naked, her negligible ass a slight mound in the long taut length of her body. Gail could see the scars, some old and some new, which Nan seemed to pay as little attention as she did to any bodily need except sex.

  "When I was eight or nine," Nan said, "I wanted a cat. Not just any cat, a genemod cat I saw advertised on the vids. My mother had died a few months before, and I really wanted this cat. It was bright blue and it had huge silver eyes and big ears like an elephant and it could talk. Not really, of course, but there was an audio program wired in its throat to respond to different tensions on the vocal chords, so that when it made a low contented purr there also came out words saying 'I'm so happy' or some such shit."

  "I remember them," Gail said. She'd thought them hideous, but then when Nan had been eight or nine, Gail had been twenty-eight or -nine.

  "I wanted this cat with everything that was in me. I tried to wear my father down. I talked about the cat at breakfast. I talked about the cat at lunch. I talked about the cat at dinner. I'd stand outside the bathroom while he was in there peeing, and shout through the door about the cat. I emailed him holos of the cat. I was relentless."

  Gail had no trouble believing this.

  "The weird thing was, I could have afforded to just go buy the fucking cat. I had money my grandmother had given me over the years, quite a lot of it, in a bank account. But I wanted him to give me the cat. To show that he knew how much I wanted it, or that he approved of my desire, or some such fucking thing."

  To show that he loved you, Gail thought. She put her hand on Nan's bare ass. Nan didn't seem to notice.

  "But he wouldn't buy me the cat. Instead he'd sit me down and talk to me gently about simplicity, and nonviolence, and the truth of letting natural creatures be what they were instead of altering their genes just for the vanity and egocentricity of humans. He'd go on and on, always patient, never losing his temper. And I'd get more and more insistent about wanting the cat. I spray-painted a picture of the cat on his doctor-office door. I threw tantrums in public. I even traced the outline of the cat on his bed in my own shit."

  Oh, my God, thought Gail. Poor Dr. Shipley.

  "The more I pushed, the more he talked to me patiently and dragged me to silent Meetings for Worship and tried to do stupid things like read me bedtime stories. But I didn't stop asking for the cat."

  "It was a power struggle."

  "You bet your talented fingers. So one day he comes home with this kitten. Not the cat. Not genemod. An ordinary, wide-eyed, puking-cute kitten, gray with white stripes. And that's supposed to settle me. Do you know what I did?"

  "What?" Gail already knew she wasn't going to like the answer.

  "I took my money out of the bank and I took the kitten to a geneshop on the Indian reservation. They were legal there, you know, it wasn't U.S. land so—"

  "I know," Gail said. "Go on..."

  Nan rolled over, shaking off Gail's hand, and she lay on her back, looking up through the mesh screen at the stars. "I couldn't make the kitten over into the cat I wanted, of course. But I had them insert fluorescent genes under her skin so she'd glow blue. I had them add growth hormone to her ears. I had them do ... other stuff. And then I brought the kitten home and showed it to my father. 'See?' I said. 'A genemod cat, and everything I got done to make her this way will kill her in a month or two.' "

  "Nan—"

  "Don't go soft on me, Gail. Or flay me, either. I flayed myself enough. I hated what I'd done. But I didn't hate it as much as I wanted to get back at my father. And I really didn't hate what I'd done as much as I hated his reaction."

  "Which was what?" She couldn't guess. Unimaginative, Jake sometimes called her.

  "Dad cried. He had the kitten 'put to sleep' before it could suffer, and he cried for the kitten. And for me. But he never yelled at me, or punished me, or told me what a fucking shit I was."

  Nan's voice held fury, which confused Gail. She said nothing, waiting.

  "Don't you see?" Nan lashed out. "I wasn't worth getting angry with! He'd already written me off as evil, beneath anger or contempt, and so he didn't spare me any! The bastard had already dismissed me as hopeless!"

  Gail lay quietly. She saw that it wouldn't help to say anything, but that she was going to say it anyway. "There might be other ways to interpret his behavior, Nan."

  "You can't resist defending him, can you?"

  "Oh, rot. I attack Dr. Shipley's ideas sixteen times a day, and you know it. But I know that all parents make mistakes. That's why I'm profoundly glad I never wanted to be one."

  "Me, neither," Nan said, and seemed t
o lose interest in the entire subject. "Are you really going back to Mira City tomorrow?"

  "Yes."

  "The situation here doesn't really interest you, does it? Two races of aliens, a space war—"

  "Hypothetical space war," Gail said. "God, it sounds like something from bad vid. No, it doesn't interest me all that much. I know that's hard for you to understand, because the puzzle of it fascinates you. What fascinates me is running Mira City. Making all the pieces of that puzzle come together every single day: managing the water and food supply in and the wastes out and the buildings going up and the courts developing and the crops adapting to Greentrees. What do I have to work with? How can I best use it? What else do I need and where can I get it?"

  To Gail's surprise, Nan nodded. "I can see that. Sort of. For you, anyway."

  Gail smiled. "A gracious concession. We're not much alike, dear heart."

  "Nothing alike."

  "So why—"

  "Oh, God, not this," Nan said. "Every lover I've ever had has run this program on me eventually. 'Why us?' Why not? And don't go thinking that by that I mean we're just a one-night's roll-and-tickle, Gail. I like you. I just don't want to analyze why. Ask me something else."

  "All right," Gail said belligerently. "How did you know that Lahiri used to accuse me of hubris? How did you know about Lahiri?"

  "Somebody overheard Jake mention her to you once. As for the hubris, I guessed."

  "Good guess. But I don't want you to mention her again."

  "Okay. My turn to ask something. Why are you partners with a dribble dick like Jake?"

  Gail said judiciously, "I don't know that his dick actually dribbles, having never tested it out," and was rewarded by Nan's giggle. "However, I like Jake. He put up his part of the money and he does his part of the work and he does it well."

  "His part of the work is manipulating people," Nan said.

  "Oh, and you never engage in that behavior yourself."

  Nan grinned at her, a wicked grin Gail could see clearly. The sky must be brightening. But the next moment Nan stopped grinning and said soberly, "There's something gnawing at Jake."