CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  "Come," the Fur said, through the translator egg he carried. The smooth egg shape had now sprouted a handle. Convenient, Gail thought. She shook George awake.

  The nine humans followed the Fur through the same narrow featureless corridor, or perhaps a different one, to the shuttle. Again they were herded into the claustrophobic space. Gail, the last to enter, felt a Fur tentacle on her arm and jumped.

  "Keeper of names and birds, you may die now, if you choose to die now for birds and the morning sky."

  Not a sky in sight, morning or otherwise. Not to mention birds. Gail said as firmly as she could manage, "I do not choose to die now for birds and the morning sky."

  The Fur let her go and she climbed into the shuttle.

  "Lie down," Jake said sharply. "Possible acceleration." He had barely finished talking when Gail felt the gees pressing down on her. She endured it, having no choice, not fighting. After a few moments it passed.

  "Everyone?" Jake said. "Doctor?"

  Nan answered. "He passed out. But he's breathing." She watched her father, and Gail watched Nan.

  Nan had held his hand during the pathetic, mawkish "memorial silence" for the dead Vine, but let go of it immediately afterward and hadn't glanced at him again. Whatever was going on with Nan, Gail wished the girl would get over it. Nan should make up her mind to either behave decently toward Shipley or ignore him. Just as Nan should make up her mind about the Furs. She'd championed the experimental Furs on Greentrees and she hated the callous Furs here. This seemed clear enough to Gail, and reasonable, but Nan apparently complicated it in her own perverse mind. For some reason she needed a unified set of reactions, and it was tearing her up, and Gail couldn't see why. Gail felt herself growing impatient with Nan's anguish about aliens. It was self-indulgent.

  And Jake, too, had something weird going on between him and Lucy, something that had started during their night talk in the rain. Lucy wouldn't meet his eyes or sit near him, not once during the day and a half aboard the Fur ship. If it had been a day and a half; the lights never dimmed and all they'd had to go by was their own internal clocks.

  Why couldn't any of them, Nan and Shipley and Jake and Lucy and probably even Franz Mueller, still brooding over having killed Scherer, recognize what was genuinely important here? Survival was what mattered now. The rest was just self-absorption. Gail wanted to shake them.

  Her belly rumbled. God, she was starving. No food had ever been offered on the ship. Lucy and Nan, with no extra body fat, already looked gaunt in the face. The others, more comfortably padded, just looked hungry.

  "Deceleration," Karim called, and everyone braced themselves against the only thing possible, each other. Gail's bones were rattling when the shuttle stopped.

  What was outside?

  The door opened. Jake had positioned himself to be the first out, followed by Mueller. Gail went last, behind Shipley and Karim, the old man leaning on the young physicist.

  A different planet. Expected, of course, but still a shock. Her body felt heavy, sluggish. She looked around and blinked.

  They stood on a wide plateau beside a steep mountain. In one direction rose red rocky slopes, half covered with greenish vegetation. After so long on Greentrees, the red stone and green flora looked strange, wrong. Plants should be purple.

  In the opposite direction she could see for miles, a vista of rugged terrain. Valleys, rivers, more mountains. The sun low in the sky was small and very bright, and the shadows had knife-sharp edges and strange coloring. Was it the same sun? Yes, they hadn't been traveling long enough to have left the Greentrees star system.

  A slow, cold wind blew. The air, which raised goose bumps on her skin, smelled pungent with ... something. Something rotting. Gail took a step forward. The ground pulled at her. The sky was naked of birds ... too much gravity? Despite herself, Gail felt tears prick her eyes. The scene was too alien, austere and wild and unwelcoming. Angry at her weakness, she blinked the tears away.

  To her left stood a large triangular stone building, the rough reddish stones mortared together in no particular patterns, and some much smaller outbuildings. Smoke rose from a hole in the roof. It smelled acrid. Something brightly colored was tied to poles beside the building, but Gail had no idea what it was.

  Two Furs had also exited the shuttle. One addressed Jake as if the others didn't exist. "This is another planet where enemies made our people as blasphemies. We will leave you humans here. The enemy will come here to visit the blasphemies. They will take you in their ship if you ask them to take you in their ship. They will take you to their planet.

  "You will not tell them we have found this world. You will not tell them we have found the other world where you were. You will tell them you were left here by other humans to die. They will take you to their planet.

  "On their planet you will be under their shield. You will destroy their shield so we can attack. You will not tell them why you will destroy their shield. You will tell us where you are and what you do on your—" and the translator barked an untranslatable sound.

  Simultaneously, the Fur handed Jake a flat metal tablet that Gail recognized instantly. The screen from the portable version of the Mira City quee sender/receiver, severed from its energy source. It had been transported to the beacon site in case some final, fatal confrontation occurred and that had been the last chance to quee Earth about the fate of the Greentrees colony. The Furs must have taken it from the human skimmer before they blew up the craft.

  The Fur said, "If you do not do all these things, we will destroy Greentrees and your city and all humans on Greentrees. If you do not do all these things, we will find Earth and destroy it. Earth will not be hard to find." The Fur turned to go.

  "Wait!" Jake said. "We have questions!"

  The Fur turned back, without change of expression. At least not as far as Gail could tell.

  Jake said, "How do we destroy the shield? We don't know how to do that!"

  "Then you must learn how."

  "But ... we have no weapons!"

  "You must learn how," the Fur repeated.

  Gail said, "The quee you gave us ... our sender-to-you-of-information"—she pointed to the tablet in Jake's hand—"it has no power! It will not send to you without power!"

  "We put power into it," the Fur said. "It will send to us, Keeper of Lists and Birds."

  "But—"

  "If you do not do all these things, we will destroy Greentrees and your city and all humans on Greentrees. If you do not do all these things, we will find Earth and destroy it."

  Gail watched Jake pull himself together. "You have said, Leader, that we must destroy the shield from the enemy planet. But think about this for a minute. We do not have such advanced technology as you. You know that from our shuttle, our weapons, our quee power source, which was so much bigger and more clumsy than yours. You are clearly superior to us in technology. So if you cannot destroy the shield, how can we humans, who—"

  "If you do not do all these things," the Fur said, "we will destroy Greentrees and your city and all humans on Greentrees. If you do not do all these things, we will find Earth and destroy it." Once again he turned, impervious to Jake's flattery or logic. Gail felt panic rising in her.

  The first Fur disappeared into the shuttle. The second spoke directly to her.

  "Keeper of Names and Birds, you may die now, if you choose to die now for birds and the morning sky."

  "I don't choose to die, damn it!" Gail said, before she could stop herself. The Fur didn't react. It disappeared into the shuttle, and a second later the shuttle began to lift. Gail felt the heat shock, much less than from a human craft but still perceptible, and threw herself on the ground with her arms over her head. By the time she got up, unhurt, the shuttle had gone.

  "All right," Jake said, stopped, started again. "We need shelter and food. I'm going to knock on the door of that charming chateau and see if we can get an invitation to tea. Franz and George, you come with me. Gail, take everybody else ... somew
here. Behind that boulder, I guess, or into that ravine. And take this."

  Nan said, "I'm going with you, Jake. I lived with Furs on Greentrees." He didn't argue, either because it was too much trouble or because he thought she might actually be useful. Gail considered both reasons specious. These Furs—if they turned out to be Furs— weren't the same as the ones on Greentrees. And it was a leader's place to enforce his own decisions.

  "Give me the quee," she said to Jake. Often, although not invariably, she had been the one to use it both aboard the Ariel and in Mira City. He handed it to her. Detached from its clumsy and large base, it felt unnaturally light. Could there really be enough power in there for a quantum-entanglement energy link with whatever counterparts the Furs had on their ship? And how were the crazy aliens going to read the English writing she would send? None of it made any sense. Nothing had made any sense since the first Fur colony had been discovered on Greentrees.

  "All right, everybody," she said, "let's go."

  The rough ground, red rocks mixed with low prickly plants bearing pungent dark blue berries, hurt her bare feet. And God alone knew what pathogens they were stepping in, or breathing in. If exposure didn't get them, disease might.

  Don't think like that.

  "Dr. Shipley, can you manage?" she asked. The old man looked both terrible and ridiculous, his huge belly hanging over the strip of gray cloth tied around his hips, his gray-haired chest prickling with gooseflesh from the cold. Every line in his face sagged.

  "Yes, I can, Gail. Thank you." Lucy and Karim helped him down the slope behind the boulder. At the bottom, Gail saw, was a sort of indentation in the cliff wall. Less than a cave, more than an overhang. It would do.

  They slipped and slid down the slope, pebbles clattering away under their feet. Gail's body felt too heavy. She stepped on something sharp and cursed. But inside the not-quite-a-cave they were protected from the wind, and the rock was even warm from sunshine. She sat down gratefully.

  Immediately Karim began to talk. "I think that's an F-class star, maybe an F7 or F8. I would guess from the level of glare that we're much farther from the primary than Terra is from Sol, so we're not getting nearly the energy. The gravity seems about a third more than Terra. The air pressure is greater, that's why you're having trouble breathing. The—"

  "Karim," Gail said, "is any of this information of practical use to us?"

  He thought a minute. "There's probably more UV, X rays, and charged particles than we're used to. We should try to stay out of the sun."

  "Great," Gail said. "The sun is the only thing keeping us from freezing."

  "And don't move too quickly. It's going to take a while to adjust to this denser air pressure."

  Gail examined the bottom of her foot. Whatever she'd stepped on hadn't broken the skin.

  Lucy said, "I saw some garden plots behind that stone lodge. I could go get some food. If the Furs can eat it, maybe we can, too."

  Ingrid snapped, "You don't even know if Furs are the life form here."

  True enough. Without information, without their technology to test new plants and excavate tunnels and protect them from predators and cure them of mishaps, they were helpless. Near-naked infants with nothing to do but wait.

  Fortunately, the wait wasn't long. George reappeared, looking excited and ridiculous in his inadequate gray loincloth. "Gail! Everybody! Come on up, there's food in the lodge."

  They scrambled up the small slope, Lucy and Karim helping Dr. Shipley. The old man was puffing badly. On the plateau, the cold wind hit them again. Gail was glad to enter the stone lodge.

  Inside was warm, smoky, and crowded. An open hearth burned in the center of the room, the smoke ascending through the hole in the roof. Wooden beams were hung with unrecognizable bunches of plants and hunks of what looked like meat inside clear membranes. A dozen Furs sat huddled together on one side of the fire, half of them children. As usual, Gail couldn't read their expressions, but there was no mistaking their postures. Gail had seen that shrinking in dogs, in cats, in cornered mice, as well as in human beings. These Furs were terrified.

  On the other side of the fire, eating something grayish-green, sat the rest of the humans except for Nan. She crouched with the Furs, carefully matching her body posture to theirs, growling softly at one of the adults.

  Jake said, "They seem scared witless of us. Ingrid thinks the viral alteration in this lot might be something analogous to the human trait of novelty avoidance. Anything new scares them into paralysis."

  Gail said, "Should you be eating that?" Her mouth watered from just seeing it.

  George said seriously, "We don't have much choice. Either we eat or we starve. The Furs made this, it's a sort of dried plant mush, I think. There are piles of it in that hole over there. They didn't object when we took some."

  Nan said acidly from the other side of the fire, "They wouldn't object if we took everything they owned. Don't you understand? They've been mutilated, in their brains and in their survival instincts, so that the Vines can create Furs who are so afraid of them they'll do anything to avoid new objects, experiences, or beings. It's experimental rape."

  So Nan had resolved her conflict about aliens. She'd found a new group of victims to champion, and the Vines were again the evil dehumanizers. So to speak.

  Gail peered into the hole George had indicated. It was lined with more clear membranes and filled with chunks of the gray-greenish food. She picked up a piece and licked it. Slightly bitter, but not repulsive. Her belly was having contractions from hunger. She chewed on the chunk and sat close to the welcome warmth of the fire.

  "If we all die in the night," George said, "that will solve the issue of what to do next."

  "We're not going to die in the night," Gail said. Now they had food, shelter, possible mentors. There was something for her to work with.

  "Gail," Jake said, "wake up. They're gone."

  "What?" She lay on the lodge floor, wrapped in a blanket made of some grayish pelt she couldn't identify but which itched. It also smelled strange. Neither smell nor itch had kept her from sleep. After three nights featuring rain, tension, and cold, falling asleep in this itchy hide in this smoke-filled space had seemed like the greatest luxury imaginable. So, of course, it hadn't lasted.

  "They're gone," Jake repeated. "The Furs. All of them."

  She sat up. The lodge was full of pale watery light: dawn. Everyone lay asleep except Jake, Karim, and...

  "Where's Nan?" Oh, God, she had gone with them, the little idealistic fool...

  "Outside. Karim wanted to see if the charged light from the primary produces auroras. He left without noticing whether the Furs were here or not, but Nan woke up when she heard him and she noticed right away. She woke me."

  "And you woke me," Gail said, trying to hide her relief that Nan hadn't traipsed off to live with the natives. "Why?"

  "Because while Karim was stargazing he thought he saw an object moving among the stars. It might just be a comet or meteor, he said. But it also might be a ship."

  "Already?"

  "Presumably," Jake said dryly, "the Furs plan well. Gail, if there is a ship, and if it's Vines, and if they indeed rescue us, we have to decide what we're going to do."

  "I know," Gail said. It had actually been a kind of luxury to concentrate on simple survival. Food, water, clothing, shelter. It kept the larger issues at bay. Genocide, treachery, planetary sabotage, the destruction of Mira City. Nobody should have to make decisions that big.

  She said softly, "We couldn't do it even if we wanted to, Jake. We don't have the faintest idea how."

  "Really?" he said bitterly. "Not even you? The keeper of lists and birds?"

  "Go fuck yourself," she said, and felt a little better. "Are there auroras out there?"

  "Spectacular ones. All over the sky. I suggest you catch them now, before the sun rises."

  "No," Gail said. "I'd rather get everybody up and breakfast organized."

  They ate quickly, silently, a necessar
y task rather than the slavering relief it had been last night. Even Mueller ate, although reluctantly. He seemed to shudder when the alien food touched his lips. Ingrid threw another log on the dying fire. Several people sat wrapped in their itchy blankets. Gail, George, and Lucy had already started to hack and tie theirs into something more closely approximating clothing.

  Gail waited for Jake to begin. He looked better than she expected, reasonably rested and fed, but controlled desperation tautened his face.

  "All right, here are our options as I see them, people. Either the Vines come for us, like the Furs said, or they don't. We can't control that. What we can do is pick one of three choices. We can disappear into the wilderness and hide from any aliens, Vines or Furs, that show up. Survival would be problematic because we don't know this planet at all, and we don't have our technology to get to know it safely. But since we would be so low-tech, if we move far enough, probably no aliens will detect us. After all, they're only using a tiny fraction of the planet for the experimental colonies. That's choice one."

  George said, "I don't put our survival chances very high. We have no idea what predators, insect-analogues, or poisonous plants we'd encounter. And even if we do go, if what Karim saw was a ship, the Vines might be here pretty soon. Who knows how many colonies they have here or in what order this one is to be checked on?"

  Gail said, "That doesn't rule out choice one, though."

  Jake said, "Choice two. Do what the Furs said. Go with the Vines, tell them we've been marooned here by our own people, get under their planetary shield. Then hope we can figure out a way to destroy the shield."

  No one spoke.

  "Choice three. We meet the Vines and tell them the truth, including what the Furs want us to do. Then we hope they can help us."