CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  All three Furs entered the room with the humans. The leader said to Gail through the translator, "Keeper of Names and Birds, do you wish to die now for birds and the morning sky?"

  "No," Gail said.

  He turned to Jake. "Tell us where is the enemy's gene library."

  "I must draw it," Jake said. "We don't understand what the enemy said. We just memorized it. I must draw it."

  The leader bared his impressive teeth. A pan-stellar carnivore gesture, Jake noted impersonally. All three Furs still wore their close-fitting suits and clear helmets. How much air did the outfits hold? Jake saw no tanks or hoses. The Furs were not the bio-wizards the Vines were. The air supply in those helmets must be limited.

  The second male set down the translator and disappeared. Time passed before she returned, carrying a round blank slate made of ... something. No one said anything. The only sound was Shipley's snoring.

  Jake took the slate and a curious curved "pen" that seemed to have no exposed point but that marked on the slate anyway. He began to draw constellations, very slowly. The constellations had been carefully displayed on Vine's bioarm. Vine had said they indicated a plausible false location for the gene library. Jake hoped it was as plausible to Furs as to Vines.

  The ship rocked slightly, just once. Karim blinked hard.

  The Furs did not remove their helmets.

  Jake drew with agonizing slowness, finally stopping completely. "I'm trying to remember everything," he said apologetically to the translator. "I want to get it right."

  "You realize," George had said to Jake, "that after they think they have the location, they have no reason not to kill us."

  True enough. But not conclusive. Jake had been a lawyer for a long time; you never released a material witness until you had corroborated his testimony. He didn't know what the military analogue was for that judicial safeguard, but he was sure there was one. These creatures were soldiers.

  And aliens.

  He drew yet more slowly.

  Shipley snored.

  The leader reached up and removed his helmet.

  Jake drew a few more meaningless strokes. The other two Furs removed their helmets. Carefully Jake moved toward the Fur to show him the slate. Jake didn't get too close, or make any sudden gestures. He just extended the slate, but not too far, and when the leader leaned in for a closer look, Jake breathed on him very gently, so that the soft puffs of air were almost like a discreetly blown kiss.

  Lucy began vomiting about an hour later. Until then, there had been almost an air of celebration in the closed ship compartment. A very quiet celebration, since no one said anything overtly. The chamber was undoubtedly under surveillance. But people smiled at each other. Humans had probably infected the Furs. Humans were alive. Still. For now.

  On the other hand, the female with the weapon had torn the quee from Gail and carried it away with her. Jake had no idea what they would do with it, or with the "death flowers" inside, if those were discovered.

  "I wish we had some water," Gail said. "Last time they gave us water." She had torn more cloth from the floor matting, which was getting pretty scruffy, and cleaned up Lucy as well as she could. It wasn't very well. Lucy lay quiet, glassy-eyed, in a corner.

  Ingrid said loudly, "She must have eaten some food gone bad." Gail rolled her eyes at this clumsy attempt at misdirection.

  Jake became aware that his own insides were beginning to feel peculiar. A little sour, then roiling... He just made it to another corner before he vomited.

  "Oh, God," he heard Gail say.

  Things got strange after that. Vine was bending over him, only it wasn't Vine but Beta, covered with black flowers like horrific shiny orchids. "You murdered Mrs. Dalton," Beta said in Lucy's voice. Dr. Shipley was there, too, sitting in his damned shared silence, except that when Jake shook himself loose of Beta and walked over to the physician, he saw that Shipley wasn't praying. He was dead. "You murdered Mrs. Dalton," the corpse said, and Jake screamed back, "I was only trying to save Mira City!" Then Nan danced by, naked and writhing lewdly.

  "Don't hallucinate out loud!" Gail said, leaning close to his ear. "What if they're listening?"

  "All right," he answered, but it came out in Fur so she didn't understand and went away.

  Fire danced along his arms and legs. He held the arms up to admire the colors in the flames: red and yellow and orange and blue and green and red and yellow and...

  "I need water, damn it!" Gail bellowed at the ceiling. "At least give me some water!" Then, the next minute or hours later, "Oh, fuck. Nan!"

  After that, nothing.

  30

  Gail had each one in a corner: George, Ingrid, Jake, Lucy. All vomiting in unison. God, the stench was awful.

  And then Karim started to puke.

  "You don't have it!" Gail cried, forgetting surveillance. "You didn't drink it!"

  "I must have ... have caught it from ... one of them," Karim said, paling under his brown Arab skin like a suddenly peeled coconut.

  Gail's spine froze. If Karim had caught it from one of the others, he might get too sick to fly the ship. And if Karim could catch it from an infected human, then so could Gail.

  And then no one would be left functional. And Mira City...

  Only activity kept her going. Now that there were five of them vomiting, she was fresh out of corners. She put Karim against the wall between Lucy and Jake. Dr. Shipley and Nan slept on, oblivious, in the center of the room.

  The most she could do was tear cloth strips off the floor, or off their bodies, to clean up the sick ones, and to make sure none aspirated any vomit. Good thing she wasn't squeamish, at least not about humans. After what seemed an eon, all except Jake stopped puking and fell into a fitful sleep, and Gail thought the worst was over.

  Then Jake, whose fever felt the highest to her unaided palm, began hallucinating aloud. "You murdered Mrs. Dalton!" he cried.

  Mrs. Dalton? Who was she? Jake tried to sit up, his face twisted in horror, his body quaking with fever and fear. Gail pushed him back down again. "Jake, don't hallucinate out loud! What if they're listening?"

  "You murdered Mrs. Dalton!" and then, "I was only trying to save Mira City!"

  Gail tried to drown out his maunderings. At the top of her lungs she screamed, "I need water, damn it!" Which was certainly true. She kept on screaming it until Jake quieted.

  To her surprise, the door opened and a Fur entered, carrying a basin of water.

  Gail shrank back. An alien touch ... But the Fur ignored her. It walked a few steps into the room, stopped, stared down at the basin, looked around, stared again at the basin, stopped again.

  Gail had never seen a Fur behave like that. And it was unarmed. Furs always had weapons, or were accompanied by other Furs with weapons. This one stood motionless in the room. Cautiously Gail stood and approached it. She reached out and took the basin from the alien's hands.

  Its lips drew back over its teeth. Oh, God, it was angry ... but the lips quivered and the skin around the eyes did something. The powerful tail quaked. It looked like ... these were aliens, but for a crazy moment Gail was sure that the thing was laughing.

  The Fur turned and walked back toward the door in the same bizarre manner, as if it was having trouble remembering what it was supposed to do. Its tail quaked some more. It lurched out the door. Gail slammed the basin down, not caring that fully a third of the water sloshed onto the floor. She snatched at the door just before it finished closing and caught it in her hand.

  Heart hammering, she waited for the door to be slammed on her fingers, or jerked open again in fury. Neither happened. After a long moment she stretched out her other arm toward Karim, who lay closest to the door. Her finger just reached a piece of vomity cloth she had used to wipe his face. Gail grimaced in disgust, folded the cloth several times, and wedged it in the door.

  That Fur had been infected.

  "They'll be happy," Jake had promised. "Dreaming in the sun," was the way Vine had put it. M
aybe, but to Gail that alien had looked punch-drunk. Maybe that was just the first stage. Too bad it hadn't been the first stage for humans, too. A bunch of giggling shipmates would have smelled better than a bunch of feverish vomiters.

  She mopped up the precious water she had spilled by wringing out soiled cloths to use again. With the clean water left in the basin she did a better job of washing the five sufferers' faces. Should she give them water to drink? She had no way of knowing how safe the water was. Better not.

  Creeping around the fouled cabin, she checked on everyone again. They were all alive. Lucy seemed a little cooler, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Dr. Shipley and Nan still slept like the dead. How long were their induced comas supposed to last? Had Jake even thought to ask?

  Shaking her head, Gail tried to think of something else to do. Inactivity was the enemy, always. If she kept busy, she'd be all right. But she couldn't think of anything else. Finally, all she could do was sit and stare at the propped-open door until, incredibly, she fell asleep.

  She woke with a scream. Something was happening, something terrible. But it was only Nan, sitting up groggily in the middle of the floor. From some combination of fear and joy, Gail cried, "Oh, fuck. Nan!"

  "I'm glad to see you, too," Nan retorted, looking around her. Her grogginess disappeared too quickly. Glaring at Gail, she demanded, "What has that rat-bite Jake done now?"

  And it was going to have to be Gail who told her. Nan, who had hated the Vines from the beginning. Nan, who disapproved with passionate morality of biological experimentation on another species. Nan, who was capable of anything.

  Gail crawled over to Nan and put her mouth very close to Nan's ear. "Surveillance," she breathed. "Can't talk now. Wait."

  And there was nothing Nan could do but accept that. For once. It was almost a triumph.

  Dr. Shipley didn't wake. After an hour in which nothing whatsoever happened, Gail couldn't stand it anymore. If the infection spread among Furs as fast as it did among humans, everyone on board was already diseased by now. She hoped.

  "Come on," she said to Nan. "We're going."

  Nan's eyes widened. "Going where?" Apparently she hadn't noticed the cloth holding the door open a fraction of an inch.

  Gail took Nan's hand—how good the small scarred fingers felt!— and led her to the door. Carefully Gail pried it open. Nan made a satisfying sound of surprise. Gail said, "The Furs have been infected."

  "You don't know that! You only know that five of us are deathly sick!"

  "The Furs are infected, too," Gail said with more conviction than she felt.

  The two women crept out the door. They stood in the featureless corridor by which they'd entered the ship. At the end, Gail knew, was an airlock; she didn't want that. The corridor branched to the right, and she led Nan that way. It branched again. Gail chose randomly.

  As soon as she rounded the second corner she gasped and stopped. Two Furs lay writhing on the floor. Sick? Too sick to leap up and attack? Gail backed away frantically, but Nan caught her shoulder.

  "Gail, they're mating!"

  "Mating?"

  Nan laughed. It did look like mating, Gail thought, in that the two seemed to be shoving hard against each other. What else were they doing? Suddenly Gail didn't want to know. The infected ones will be sexually irresistible to other Furs. Jake had told her. Well, it wasn't going to do humans any good if they wasted all that lust on each other. That was no way to spread the infection.

  At least they weren't vomiting.

  "Take this," Nan said. She'd spotted two of the curved weapon-things on the floor beside the oblivious Furs and had retrieved them. She thrust one at Gail.

  "I don't know how to use it," Gail whispered.

  "And I do? Take it!" Nan didn't bother to lower her voice. The copulating Furs never looked up.

  Nan aimed the weapon and began fiddling with one end. Gail caught her arm. "You don't know anything about the settings! You could blow a hole in the ship!"

  "I guess you're right," Nan said. "So what do we do with these two?"

  Gail was only glad that Nan wasn't still posing as the champion of Furs. But Nan's next words dispelled that illusion.

  "They'd be better off dead than made into these experimental caricatures," she said bitterly.

  "We need these experimental caricatures. Don't be a moron, Nan. Let's just ... just go on."

  They crept carefully past the frenzied copulators, who didn't seem to notice. Nan said, "That must be some fuck."

  Gail ignored her. What was she doing, brazenly thrusting into the enemy's part of the ship? But what kind of enemy was more interested in sex than war?

  A good enemy to have.

  The corridor led to a large room. Before she saw anything else, Gail saw that the floor of the room was made of some thick, clear material crossed with gray struts in an irregular pattern. The floor was bowed at the edges, and under it a short way from the center was a mass of dark stuff connected by a short thick pole.

  "So it is a McAndrew Drive," Nan breathed, but Gail scarcely heard her. She had caught sight of the Furs in the chamber.

  There were five of them. They all sat on the floor, their balancing tails spread out behind them. Two looked up as the humans entered, and Gail caught her breath. But the Furs didn't move. They merely gazed quietly at the humans, as if they found them interesting contemplative objects.

  "Get ... get their weapons," Gail said unsteadily.

  Nan complied. No Fur objected to having the guns, or whatever they were, taken from them. But one arose just as Nan disarmed him, and Gail gave a little cry. Nan leaped back. The Fur ignored her, walking over to a storage cabinet. It removed something and began unconcernedly to eat.

  So they could feed themselves. What else? Or was this only the first stage of the illness, as the humans had had a violent first stage, and would the infected Furs act differently later on? Gail had no idea.

  Nan had staggered on that last leap backward. Now she lurched over to Gail, saying unsteadily, "A little light-headed..."

  "Of course you are. You refused to eat anything for days!" Gail snapped, just as Nan fainted.

  Wonderful. Just what Gail needed. Tranquilized aliens, puking shipmates and a starving Nan. Not to mention that Gail hadn't the vaguest idea what she herself was doing.

  She slapped Nan awake and made her eat some of whatever the Fur had taken from the storage bin. Nan had always been willing to eat the food of Furs, who killed humans. It was the food of Vines, who helped humans, that Nan refused. But this was no time to reflect on the perversity of human nature.

  "I think we need to pen them all up in some one room, before they ... change in some way."

  "Change in what way?" Nan said.

  "How should I know? The only room that I'm sure locks is the one we were imprisoned in. We need to get all the humans out of there and put in all the Furs we can find."

  Nan stared at her as if Gail were crazy.

  "Well, do you have a better plan?"

  "I might, if you'd tell me the whole story of what the fuck's going on!"

  "I'll tell you while we drag our people out here. Come on, let's get going."

  Nan took it better than Gail expected. Too well, in fact. Gail would need to think about that later.

  By the time they'd dragged the five sick humans plus Dr. Shipley onto the bridge, Gail's arms ached. Nan, weakened by self-willed starvation, trembled. But Karim, at least, seemed better. Maybe he had the strongest constitution, or maybe catching the thing from another human led to a milder case than being directly infected. How would Gail know? She didn't know anything.

  Karim stared at her with some recognition in his dark eyes, although he didn't answer her. The others seemed in some sort of fitful coma, unresponsive and still feverish.

  "If we could only get your father awake!" Gail said. "He's the doctor, after all."

  Nan stared somberly at her sleeping parent stretched out on the ship's floor. "It's genocide,
Gail."

  She didn't mean Shipley, Gail realized. She meant the infected Furs, sent home (if they could actually manage that) to turn the rest of their race into happy, copulating idiots.

  "Nan—" she began, but Nan cut her off.

  "You know what they're doing?" Nan said in the bitterest tone Gail had heard from her yet. She looked at the five quiet Furs, who had shown not the slightest reaction to having sick humans dragged into their midst. "They're focusing on higher qualities. They're dreaming in the sun. They're sharing silence together, waiting for the Light. They're having a fucking New Quaker meeting!"

  Gail said quietly, "Are you going to resist us on this, Nan? Try to sabotage our plan?"

  "No," Nan said wearily. "I've tried that twice, and look what happened. I know now I can't control everything that everybody else fucking chooses to do, even if I hate it."

  Not a bad definition of maturity, Gail thought. But all she said was, "Let's get started finding all the Furs."

  It was easier than she'd hoped. Gail and Nan didn't have to drag the Furs as they'd dragged the humans. They merely prodded with their stolen weapons, and the Furs obediently walked where they were pushed. There turned out to be only twelve of them aboard the ship, which was divided into many small rooms and narrow corridors. Gail finally realized that the total area was no bigger than the one large room on the adapted Vine ship. Furs and Vines apparently had different cultural ideas about how to use space.

  All twelve Furs fit easily into the featureless room with torn matting. Gail had insisted on washing out the room once she located the water supply. The chamber was clean and stocked with food and water when she removed the cloth doorstop and the door locked on their captives.

  "Now what?" Nan said.

  "Now we look for the quee they took from us."

  "Why?"

  Gail didn't say, Because the Vine death flowers are in it. "Because it's the only one we can read. Eventually other Furs are going to notice that this ship isn't communicating, or whatever it's supposed to be doing."