CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  All seven of them could fit, although it was a tight squeeze. Gail carried the quee. Unlike the Fur shuttle, this one was heated. There was the same jolt and increased gees on acceleration, however. How had Dr. Shipley taken that? Without the translator, there was no way to ask.

  A quick ride, the slight bump of docking, and they were there.

  They exited the shuttle into what had to be an airlock. Small and bare, it nonetheless had seven items resting on the floor. Clear bowls with thick neck rings: helmets. "Put these on your heads," the airlock said, the mechanical voice coming from everywhere.

  "My God!" George said. "I don't believe it!" He held the helmet close to his face and stared at it, smelled it, listened to it, fingered it, and, yes, tasted it. "I think the neck ring is filled with a life form of some type. It will presumably recycle or replace our air without the need to carry tanks or pumps. And the bowl—"

  "I'm not putting that thing on," Gail said flatly.

  Ingrid said. "You'd rather breathe methane or whatever it is they have on board?"

  "Wouldn't be methane," George said. "I think the bowls are made of some sort of secreted substance, like an oyster secretes nacre to form a pearl. The entire thing must be biomanufactured out of living bodies that—"

  "Shut up, George," Jake said. "This is not the time. Suit up, everybody."

  He led the way, suppressing his shudder as he lowered the helmet over his head. He almost tore it off a moment later when he felt something warm and slightly moist touch his neck. He made himself endure the forming seal. The air he was breathing was fresh and sweet.

  "George, you're next." By rolling his eyeballs downward he could just see the thin membrane in front of his mouth vibrate with his words. "Can you hear me?"

  "Clear as middle C," George said happily. He put on his helmet. Life, Jake thought, would be much easier if everyone on this team were an exuberant biologist. Or maybe not.

  Ingrid, Karim, and Lucy were next, all three scientists, each flinching only slightly when the neck ring sealed. Franz Mueller watched closely. He lowered his helmet warily, but once it was on, he nodded.

  "All right, Gail. Now you."

  "No," Gail said.

  Jake saw that she was genuinely terrified. She'd never liked the idea of aliens, not from the very first. She had not gone to Greentrees expecting aliens. How was she going to live the rest of her life with them, on Vine?

  Ingrid said, "Gail—"

  "Shut up," Gail snapped. She picked up the helmet, closed her eyes, and lowered it over her head. Jake put a firm hand on top. Sure enough, when the neck ring sealed, Gail tried to tear off the helmet. Jake's hand prevented her. Through the clear bowl he saw her turn ashen, then faintly green.

  "George—what if she vomits in there?"

  "The bioforms will probably clean it up," George said uncertainly. Gail didn't vomit. Jake saw her calm herself, although her color remained doubtful.

  "You're a trouper," he said to her softly. She glared at him.

  The airlock door slid open. Jake led the way into the Vine ship. He stopped, too dazed to go forward.

  George peered eagerly over his shoulder "Oh, my God!" he shouted. Jake stepped to the side, partly to let the others through and partly to catch Gail if, when she saw the ship, she either fainted or fled.

  26

  Gail faltered on the threshold, then made herself take a deep breath before she remembered that the breath was coming from slimy microbes in her neck ring. That almost made her gag again, but Gail forced herself to rally. She was going to be here awhile. It was only practical to get used to her surroundings. Jake stood hovering, looking ready to catch her if she did something stupid like fainting, which he ought to have had the sense to know she wouldn't do. Gail swept past him into the ship.

  It was one large circular room perhaps a hundred yards across. All of it—every inch—was a zoo. No, a garden: much better to think of it as a garden. Seething slime, looking at least two inches thick, covered the entire floor and crept up the walls and onto the ceiling. Vines sat tumbled together in clumps, their branches or arms or whatever they were intertwined. You couldn't tell where one creature stopped and the next began. Runners ran across the slime to connect the various groups of Vines. The light was very bright, the room stiflingly hot and humid. Instantly Gail began to sweat under her blanket-tunic.

  Not a garden. A hothouse out of some feverish nightmare.

  "Gail?" Jake said. "You all right?"

  She ignored him. Where the humans stood, the slime had drawn back, probably to keep from getting stepped on. The floor underneath seemed to be metal, but a metal pitted and corroded and irregular, maybe to give the slime purchase.

  "Where are Nan and Dr. Shipley?"

  "I don't know. I just got here myself," Jake said.

  Someone said, "We can show you," in a flat mechanical voice. Gail looked down. A translator lay at the base of one of the Vines.

  "Please show me," she said with as much firmness as she could muster.

  Slowly some of the slime began to crawl to either side of a narrow strip. It took fully five minutes, but a path opened to the opposite side of the room. By the time it was completed, Gail had taken off her tunic. She couldn't help it; it was either undress or pass out from the heat. Underneath she wore a strip of blanket tied around her hips; Jake had made them leave behind the strips of cloth taken from the other shuttle in case the Vines identified the cloth as Fur.

  Carrying her blanket and the quee, Gail walked through the parted slime (wasn't there an old legend about a sea parting for someone?). The path wound between clumps of Vines huddled silently, motionlessly together. George said they communicated by exchanging information-laden molecules. What were they saying now?

  She tried not to tremble. Even the cold, bone-crushing Fur shuttle had been better than this.

  At the far end of the room, beside the slimy wall, Dr. Shipley lay on the floor, naked except for the strip of cloth around his vast hips. Nan, who had dispensed with the cloth, hovered over him. She had laid their two blankets side by side to form an island in the slime, and Gail stepped onto it gratefully. "Nan? How is he?"

  "I don't know. He sleeps more, but it's better sleep, I think. Or maybe just unconsciousness. I don't know what these plants are doing to him! They keep sending bioarms onto his body, and one long, thin one even down into his nose."

  Gail shuddered. "They probably have to figure out his biochemistry before they can come up with any drugs. Remember, they've never seen humans before."

  "You're talking shit," Nan said accurately. "You don't know what they're doing any more than I do."

  True enough. Gail sat down beside Nan and began tearing a strip of cloth off her blanket. Nan might go nearly naked, but Gail was full-breasted and middle-aged, she bounced and sagged uncomfortably, and she wanted some sort of bra, even if it would be hot.

  All at once, the floor under Gail began to curve.

  She stifled a shriek and threw herself flat on the blanket, but of course it wasn't an earthquake. Nothing so explicable. The floor continued to bow, but ... but...

  It was a moment before she could identify what felt so weird. Nothing, including herself, was rolling downhill, even though her line of sight told her that the center of the circular room was rising. Or the edges were falling. Or something.

  Slowly she stood. Perfectly steady, said her feet. Perfectly flat floor. But her eyes said, This room is now convex.

  Karim came down the path, looking delighted. "Just as predicted! Wonderful!"

  "What's wonderful?" Gail said tartly.

  "The life capsule is adjusting its shape as it moves down the shaft toward the massplate. It must, in order to keep gravitational force equal everywhere in the living area to what it is over the gravitational center of the massplate. You see, as we accelerate—"

  "Never mind," Gail said.

  "Oh, but it's fascinating! Posit a living-area radius one-tenth the radius of the massplate. Then, at ma
ximum acceleration, when the moving living area is closest to the massplate, you'd expect twenty percent bowing because—"

  Gail turned her back on him. To Nan she said, "Food? Water?"

  "There's water being made there." Nan pointed to what looked like a hard, clear cup nestled in the slime at a base of a huge Vine. "The water just appears. What do you suppose it's made of?"

  "H20."

  "Ha ha," Nan said sourly, but she looked slightly reassured, which made one of them.

  "How are we supposed to drink it through these helmets?"

  "I don't know," Nan said, but of course if there was a risk to be taken, Nan must take it. She picked up the cup and brought it up to her lips. As helmet and cup touched, the helmet bowed inward and fused to the cup. In a moment they were one, and the water— or whatever it was—poured into Nan's mouth. When she pulled the cup away, it separated from her helmet, which returned to its original rounded shape.

  "They think of everything," Nan said, and her tone was not admiring at all.

  A routine developed, bizarre though the idea seemed to Gail. Three blanket islands were created amid the constantly foaming slime. The largest was near the single Vine that possessed a translator, beside the airlock door. The second was about twenty yards away, for people who wished to sleep without talk. Sleeping in the helmets took some getting used to, but they managed it. The third island, dubbed "the infirmary," was on the far side of the room where Dr. Shipley lay unconscious. This site had been chosen by the Vines when Nan and Shipley first came aboard. No one knew the significance of its location, if there was one.

  Permanent paths, narrow enough to walk single file, connected the three blanket islands. The paths led "uphill" as registered by line of sight, although there was never any muscular sensation of walking "up" or "down." Karim said, "That's because wherever you step, the force is perpendicular to the floor." He spent hours working out the calculations.

  A separate path led to an unblanketed spot that the humans used as a latrine. This was shielded from view from the islands by a towering clump of Vines. Gail hated using it. She hated even more the fact that every time she returned, the spot was bare of waste. What did the slime do ... eat it? She tried not to picture this.

  Beside each path, several of the hard clear cups had appeared, with indentations for each in the slime. When a cup was put down, water slowly began to seep into the cup.

  George was fascinated. "The cups are made of the same material as our helmets, some nonliving compound. Well, that's not so surprising. The Terran marine sponge Rosella racovitzae constructs glass fibers for skeletal support from the silica dioxide in seawater. Oysters make pearls, insects make chitin. Naturally, the Vines have conscious control over this process."

  "Naturally," Gail said, but the sarcasm was swamped in George's enthusiasm. Gail sat with all the others except Lucy on the large blanket. Lucy slept on the other island, her small face pinched and drawn with something more than exhaustion. Nan and Dr. Shipley were likewise asleep, and Gail had gingerly walked the path, hoping desperately it wouldn't close up on her, to the big island, where George was trying to talk to the translator Vine. The process was hobbled by George's wanting to use scientific terms the translator program couldn't yet handle.

  He said now, obviously dumbing down, "You make these cups for us."

  "Yes," the flat "Vine" voice said.

  Karim said shyly, "Do you have a name?"

  "You call us 'Vine.' "

  "Yes," Jake said, "we do. But do you, yourself, have an individual name? A name for just you?"

  "We do not understand," the Vine said.

  George said, "I don't think they have individuals. It's a ... a group whole. Semidifferentiated but not psychologically separate. Like the organs in your body are differentiated but don't have individual consciousness."

  Jake looked at him. George added hastily, "Of course, I'm just guessing."

  Gail's stomach rumbled. She said, "Vine, can you make ... humans need food, you know. Or else we die."

  Jake looked as if she'd preempted his ritual "negotiating procedures" again. Well, too bad. She was hungry, and all of them, especially Dr. Shipley, were going to have to eat soon.

  "Yes," Vine said. "Humans need food. We can make food for humans. We analyze you now. Then we make food for humans."

  Analyze her? Now? What were they doing? Nervously Gail scanned her body, but she didn't see any of the slime on herself or edging over the blanket.

  George said, "You won't see it, Gail. They can use flakes off our feet on the paths. And anyway, they have Dr. Shipley."

  Vine said, "We will make food soon. We analyze now."

  Gail's stomach rumbled again.

  George said, "Vine, may I touch some of your ... your slime? The thing covering the ground?"

  "The thing covering the ground is us."

  "Oh, sorry," George said. Naked except for his blanket loincloth, sitting cross-legged with his small potbelly resting on his thighs, he looked like an embarrassed Buddha.

  Vine said, "We give to you slime to analyze." A piece of slime crawled onto the blanket and separated from the rest.

  Gail drew back. So, she noticed, did Franz, whose aversion seemed as great as her own. But George put his hand down and the slime slowly inched onto his palm. He raised it to eye level.

  "Amazing! Ingrid, look at this! It has pili—multipurpose, I'd guess, movement and chemical detection. But look at the internal structures! It's not really a biofilm, it's more like a ... a sort of superflexible multicellular."

  "It may be co-evolutionary with the Vines," Ingrid said. "Sentient, do you think?"

  "If they don't fully differentiate among the plantlike forms, they may not with this, either. It's sentient in that it's a part of them."

  "Well, if—" Ingrid began a long technical discussion, and Gail stopped listening.

  A little while later, the slime—she couldn't think of it any other way, no matter what George said—began to foam alarmingly. Something was happening. The clear cups filled not with water but with a thick, gray substance.

  Vine said, "Here comes food for you."

  Gail said, "Absolutely not." The gray goo looked completely disgusting. Her stomach growled.

  George said, "Vine, is this food made with the nutrients we need?"

  "This food is made with the nutrients you need."

  Ingrid said, "It's going to lack fiber. I doubt it will even satisfy hunger," but she picked up her cup.

  George seized his and drank it down, his helmet flowing into a cup-accommodating shape. Gail shuddered.

  "It's good!" he said. "Tastes like chicken."

  "Chicken?" Jake said.

  "It's an old joke, Jake. Never mind. It actually tastes sweet and tangy. Like lemonade."

  Jake picked up his cup. He had a determined look that Gail recognized: Jake thought he ought to set a good example even though he didn't want to. But he raised the cup and drank it all, looking surprised afterward.

  "Not bad, if you don't look at it. It is sort of like lemonade."

  Ingrid said, "It includes hunger-suppressing hormones, I think. I don't feel hungry anymore."

  Karim drank his and nodded approval. Gail could feel her mouth water from hunger. She picked it up, closed her eyes, and took a small sip. Jake was right; if you didn't look at it, it wasn't bad. Eyes closed, she drank the rest.

  Jake said, "Franz?"

  "Nein! Never!"

  Gail lowered her cup and studied the soldier. He had paled and his powerful body, on display in the brief sarong, had gone rigid. Franz said, "The aliens manipulate our minds with this. I not drink."

  George said gently, "If they wanted to manipulate our minds, Franz, they could do it with airborne molecules. They wouldn't need ingestion."

  "I not drink!" He got up and stalked down the path to the infirmary blanket.

  Vine said, "We can make for him a different food."

  "This food is fine," Jake said. "Please don't be
offended. Vine. He's ... nervous. This place is very strange to us."

  "Yes," it said neutrally.

  Gail stood. "I'm going to check on Dr. Shipley."

  And on Franz. A "nervous" rebuilt with possible surfacing paranoia struck her as a very dangerous thing. If Jake weren't so depressed with the necessary lies he was telling—and really, why should a negotiator balk at telling lies? This wasn't a side of Jake she'd seen before, and she didn't like it. If he weren't so preoccupied with that, he himself might have reacted to Franz's outburst. What was Franz doing now?

  Nothing. He sat quietly on the infirmary blanket, staring at the wall. Dr. Shipley's eyes were open.

  "He's conscious," Nan said. "They ... delivered something into him. Some drug."

  Gail heard the profound revulsion in Nan's voice, mixed with relief over her father. Gail sat down. She was conscious of her seminudity, and of Nan's, only in Shipley's presence. The big man was sweating profusely. "How are you feeling?"

  "Better. Better than in a long while, in fact. They're medicating me quite effectively."

  Gail smiled. "Well, you can ask Vine what the medication is, if you're willing to fight George for airtime."

  Shipley sat up. He smiled at his daughter, then looked away. "Naomi ... are there any clothes you could put on?"

  "He's better," Nan said, with such a complicated mix of emotions that Gail would have laughed if she hadn't known it would enrage Nan. Instead she reached for one of the two full cups beside the blanket.

  "Dr. Shipley, you should drink this. It's 'food' the Vines have prepared for us. It doesn't taste too bad, if you don't look at it."

  "You drank that?" Nan demanded.

  "Reluctantly. But I feel full now, and energized."

  "I'd rather starve!" Nan said hotly.

  Shipley took the cup from Gail, sniffed it deeply, sipped. "It tastes like lemonade."