CROSSFIRE

by Nancy Kress

  "Yes," Naomi said. "It was wrong. It's wrong."

  "But you're going along with it. With arranging for these infected Furs to spread their passivity to their home world."

  "Yes," she said, but she didn't meet his eyes.

  Shipley felt his stomach turn over, and then press upward into his chest. She was lying. She might fool Gail, but not him. Naomi was not going to go along with what she still saw as genocide to the alien race that, despite everything, she still championed. Because the Furs were the ones she'd befriended first? Because they shared DNA with humans? Or just because Naomi was, and always would be, in opposition to everyone else out of sure perversity? That was how she defined herself: lone rebel. The definition was more important to her than any external truth. Without that definition, she felt she was nothing.

  Was he any different? He defined himself as a New Quaker, it was the heart, and soul of his existence, and without it he would be nothing either.

  She was starting to look at him suspiciously. To divert her, Shipley said, "I killed Franz Mueller. I swore never to kill, and I did."

  "Oh, Dad, you just tripped him! That wasn't wrong! The fucking Vines killed him!"

  No, Shipley thought. Naomi didn't understand. His action had led directly to Franz's death. He was therefore responsible. But he let her talk on, passionate and convinced and true to her own perverse idealism. His heart was filled with painful love. My child.

  When she finally ran out of words, he said simply, "I'd like to see the Furs. What they are now."

  She jumped up eagerly. "Come on. I'm the only one that can use the wall to get in." She took him by the hand and led him to a door. Proudly she drew a small curved baton from the minimal clothing wrapped around her slim hips. She did something to it and then opened the door. A few Furs rushed the door. The rest sat quietly on the floor, raising their heads to look at the newcomers with, it seemed to Shipley, curiosity, but no alarm. Shipley walked in within Naomi's wall.

  Peace filled him, unexpected and sweet as a clean breeze in a fetid sty.

  "Naomi..." He couldn't say more. Instead he sat down beside the door.

  "Dad ... what the fuck are you doing?"

  "Sharing silence."

  He watched the expressions play over her face: impatience, the old scorn, a new tolerance. Still, he didn't think her acceptance of him would be strong enough to keep her here. So he said, "It's because of ... of Franz. I need to just sit in silence with these people for a while. Please ... sit with me, Naomi. Please."

  She hesitated, and he held his breath. But she sat. He only learned why when she said, "You're different now."

  "Different? How?"

  "It seems like—well, like you need me."

  "I do. I always did."

  She scowled. "I don't mean like that. I mean, like I'm the stronger one now. Since you killed Franz."

  "Yes."

  She stared at him hard, and he bowed his head at the lie he'd just told.

  They sat there, in silence, for a long time. Finally he said, "Naomi, turn off the wall."

  "Turn it off?"

  "These people aren't going to harm us. You can see that. They're in some advanced stage of the infection. Even the ones that rushed up at first ... look, they're all just sitting here"—dreaming in the sun—"and I want to genuinely share silence with them. Without barriers, even invisible ones."

  "I can't turn off the wall. It's holding the door open, see? The door doesn't open from this side."

  "Oh. Well, I'll hold it open. You can't believe these quiet people are going to escape." Shipley moved his bulk to sit half in, half out of the door.

  Naomi said stubbornly, "If you're 'sharing silence,' what the fuck does it matter if there's an invisible wall or not?"

  He said, "It doesn't. Never mind, dear heart. Leave it on."

  She scowled again and, contrary to the end, turned off the wall.

  Shipley reached quickly and grabbed the baton away from her. He threw it over his head outside the door as he lurched to his feet.

  He only succeeded because she hadn't been expecting it. Immediately she screamed and leaped on him. She fought with absolutely no restraint, kicking, and biting. Shipley felt her teeth close on his shoulder and he cried out. But he outweighed her by 150 pounds, an impossible advantage to overcome. Backing up, his bulk blocking the doorway, he thrust her off and slammed the door, leaving her inside.

  Heart in hard arrhythmia, he leaned against the outside of the door and wondered if he was going to have a myocardial infarction. He stared at the baton, forcing himself to concentrate on its curved hardness as his heart eventually slowed and he could breathe normally again.

  The Furs inside wouldn't hurt her. Shipley was sure of it. They would never hurt anyone again. But Naomi would likely have ended up killing them, along with everyone else on board. Shipley didn't know what sabotage she'd planned of Jake's strategy, but he was sure that sabotage had been on her mind. He, her father, had seen it in Naomi's eyes. She'd been prepared to kill everyone aboard if necessary, including herself, in the service of her belief that bringing this infection to more Furs was genocide. For that belief, Naomi would have died.

  "Let your life speak."

  And he, Shipley thought, might have agreed with her up until the moment he entered that room. When he had, when he'd sat among the newly peaceful Furs, the Light had come to him as it never had before. Not blinding but deep, sweet with conviction beyond all doubt. These people were not the zombies he'd expected. The infection had not rendered them soulless. Instead, it had removed the bloodlust that Darwinian evolution had bred into them, and allowed a higher evolution to happen. This was the right next step for the Furs. It was their path: from war to shared silence, dreaming in the sun, at peace.

  Naomi would never have seen that. She wouldn't have allowed herself to see it. And so he had thwarted her sabotage, whatever it was going to be. She would never forgive him, of course. Shipley had bought right action at the price of his daughter's fledgling love for him.

  The price was not too high. And maybe it balanced Franz's death.

  He closed his eyes, suddenly glad of whatever metal the door was made of. It was very tough. Through it he could not hear Naomi's pounding with her small fists on the other side.

  32

  The ship had stopped. Through the floor port Jake saw the long, I long pole stretching from the life quarters to the disk at its other end. Beyond the disk, far below, he saw what he'd despaired of ever beholding again.

  Greentrees.

  The planet turned slowly below him, green and blue and white with clouds, the most beautiful thing he'd ever witnessed in his entire life. The ship was in high orbit, coasting along without power. With the plasma drive turned off, all the ship's sensors were operating. Now everything depended on how well Karim had been taught by the Vines to read those sensors.

  George sat on the deck, prying open the portable quee. Karim gave him directions but never took his eyes off the strange alien displays. Karim only understood about a fourth of them, he'd told Jake. The Vines had had so little time to teach him.

  "There, it's open," George said. He tipped the quee and several small, sticky packets slid out. Death flowers.

  Lucy said quietly, "We don't know that we'll ever have a chance to give these to any Vines." No one answered her. She raised her big eyes to Jake, and it seemed to him there was a pleading expression in them. About the death flowers, or about something else? He looked away.

  Ingrid said, "What do we do with the gene packets meanwhile?"

  Unexpectedly, Dr. Shipley said, "Give them to me. I'll take care of them."

  Silently Lucy gathered up the packets and handed them to Shipley. Everyone felt awkward around the New Quaker. He'd told them, quietly and without dramatics, why he'd imprisoned Nan with the Furs. Gail had gasped and, Jake suspected, cried when she was alone. The others had nodded, unsure what to say, and had left Shipley alone to, presumably, deal with his guilt over Nan.
But Jake suspected that Shipley wasn't feeling guilty. The old doctor seemed to Jake to have a new peace about him, as if he'd settled something in his mind. Jake didn't want to know what. The convolutions of the religious mind, he told himself, were beyond him. Nor did he care.

  Now Gail said, "Then if we're ready, let's launch the quee."

  That part was easy. They put the quee in the airlock, opened it, and accelerated very briefly. The quee shot out and then followed them meekly in orbit, like a puppy on an invisible string, maybe a thousand kilometers behind. Jake saw the planet wheel out of view; Karim was positioning the ship.

  Now all they had to do was wait.

  Jake couldn't sit still, as the others were doing. Dr. Shipley sat with his head bowed and his eyes closed, presumably communing with the infinite. George, Lucy, and Ingrid sat talking in low voices, as if they feared they might distract Karim, who sat with utter concentration focused on his alien displays. Gail had disappeared.

  Jake went to look for her. As he suspected, she sat with her back against the door of the Furs' prison. The Furs', and Nan's.

  "Gail, she's all right in there. The Furs are harmless now."

  "So Shipley says." She looked up at him with determined calm. "Jake, tell me again how this is supposed to work. I still don't understand it."

  He sat beside her. The request was a welcome diversion. "Let me start by telling you what we can't do."

  "Seems appropriate," Gail said dryly. "Since this whole mess began, we haven't been able to do much about anything."

  "True enough. And now we can't hurry the Fur ship which, I'm pretty sure, will have been sent to destroy Mira City. The ship will get here when it gets here. It had communication from the Furs before we defanged them, and anyway it's homing in on our orbiting quee.

  "When the ship gets here, we can't fire on it because Karim has no idea how to operate the ship's weapons and doesn't want to risk missing his one shot.

  "We can't tell where the Fur ship will stop in relation to the orbiting quee. Undoubtedly it's going to stop outside weapons range, since it knows there's something weird going on with the ship and it also knows the ship's weapons range. We, of course, don't know the range, and so we can't tell how far out from Greentrees the ship will be when it stops decelerating and turns off its drive. We also don't know if they can fire their weapons with the drive on, or if it needs to be off."

  Gail muttered, "We don't know much."

  "But they don't know something important, either. They don't know that the orbiting quee isn't on our orbiting ship. Since the Quantum Entanglement Energy link is the only signal they're receiving, they probably assume it's coming from our ship, and furthermore that the Vines are operating the ship. They think we're way too stupid."

  "Well," Gail said logically, "they'd be right if we hadn't had the Vines show Karim how."

  Ignoring her, Jake said, "That means the Furs don't really know where our ship is."

  Gail shifted her back against the hard door. Jake could hear the tension in her voice.

  "You've made a lot of assumptions in there, Jake. What if they're not true?"

  He didn't reply to that. She already knew the answer. They would all die. Instead he said, "Now here's things we can do. We can stay unperceived by the Furs until they turn off their own drive. We can accelerate at roughly a hundred gees. We can watch after the Fur ship comes into range of our sensors and record how fast it's decelerating. Maybe we can calculate, from its position and rate of deceleration, just where it will be when it turns its drive off."

  "Maybe?"

  Jake said quietly, "Karim can read the Fur displays on speed and position and interpret the Fur numbers. Sort of. He doesn't know how to use their computer. And he doesn't know at all how to access the computer on Greentrees with this equipment, or even communicate with Greentrees. So Karim has to do the calculations manually between the time he sights the Furs' ship and the time they turn off their drive."

  Gail was silent a long moment. Then she said, "I'm going to check on Dr. Shipley. He's taking Nan's ... action very hard."

  No, he's not, Jake thought as he watched Gail walk away. You are.

  While Dr. Shipley had achieved some sort of inner resolution Jake didn't understand and didn't want to understand, Gail was tormented by Nan's intended betrayal. Gail was the most forgiving, maternal person Jake had ever known (although her feelings for Nan could hardly be called maternal). But could she forgive this? How far did love extend?

  As if on cue, Lucy rounded the bend in the corridor that Gail had just left.

  "Jake ... could we talk?"

  It was the last thing Jake wanted to do. But Lucy had already sat down facing him, her small face with its big eyes intense as ever.

  "We might not survive this," she said bluntly, "but either way, there's something I want you to know."

  "Lucy, it's not—"

  "No, please, Jake, listen. It's important to me. I said after you told me about ... about Mrs. Dalton that I just couldn't go on being with you, that I couldn't help myself. That was true, then. A deliberate murder so horrible ... I couldn't help it. But I don't feel that way now. You risked so much, Jake, you were so brave ... I mean about telling Vine we'd planned to destroy their planetary shield. You told him even before Dr. Shipley did. It was the most heroic thing I've ever seen."

  He said flatly, "So I've redeemed myself in your eyes."

  "I wasn't going to put it that way, but ... well, yes." She leaned forward and closed her eyes.

  He could smell her, a powerful feminine smell, and the scent went straight to his groin. Her face moved close to his. Before their lips could touch, he made himself push her away.

  Her eyes flew open. "Jake?"

  Anger, blessedly, lent him the firmness he needed. "You say I've redeemed myself with you, Lucy. But you haven't redeemed yourself with me." Her mouth made a small pink O.

  "You don't understand, do you? You think that because I told you something about myself that you couldn't stomach, you had the right to push me away. You're right; you did. But now you've decided that my subsequent actions cancel out that long-ago murder and so I'm fit to love again. But, Lucy, I don't want a love as fickle as that. What I told you was twenty-five-year-old history, but you still couldn't accept it. Couldn't accept me. Now you decide you can, that I've somehow met your idealistic code and the balance sheet of my desirability is in the black again. What would it take for me to slip back into the red? How much disapproval of my acts would you need to decide again I'm unfit to love you? In, out, in, out ... I don't want to live that way, always on trial with you. Always awaiting the next verdict. I'm sorry, but I don't want it.

  "I don't want you."

  He couldn't have been more brutally frank, Jake knew. He didn't regret his frankness. Lucy got up unsteadily and walked away. He watched her disappear around the bend, and closed his eyes wearily.

  He was still sitting there, some unknowable time later, when Ingrid appeared and called to him, "Jake! Come here! Karim's sighted the Fur ship!"

  A hush like an empty cathedral. It occurred to Jake that he would prefer to die amid human noise, not this cemetery quiet. But no one dared disturb Karim.

  The young physicist sat in his borrowed pilot chair, on his lap the slate and alien pen Jake had used to draw for the Furs the supposed location of the Vine genetic library. Karim scribbled furiously in small, crabbed handwriting. Every twenty seconds or so he glanced up at his displays, presumably to make sure nothing had changed. His shock of dark curly hair cast a bobbing shadow on his intent face. He was naked except for a wide strip of rough cloth around his hips.

  Calculating by hand. In base six. Under more pressure than even Jake, no stranger to tense situations, could imagine.

  Jake peered at the displays from a respectful distance, but they meant nothing to him. Squiggles and lines and peculiar beehive-looking things in three dimensions. Did Karim really know what he was doing? "A lot of assumptions," Gail had said, and she
was right. Oh, so right.

  "Okay," Karim said. "I've got it. Let's go."

  He dropped the slate and reached for the weird protrusions on the console. Jake saw his fingers tremble.

  There was, as usual, no feeling of motion. But the life quarters slid closer to the disk; they were accelerating.

  Jake couldn't tell how far out they went. It took only a few minutes, acceleration and deceleration, and then they stopped. He knew this not only because the massplate was at maximum distance from them, but also because Karim suddenly became compulsively talkative, his voice clipped with strain.

  "Okay, we're here. I cut the drive. We're just floating here. The disk is pointed toward the place I expect the Fur ship to turn off its drive, based on its velocity and rate of deceleration. We're close to it, very close. They can't detect us, of course, until they turn off their own plasma drive because their drive is creating such a furious mess of ionized gases."

  "Karim," Jake said tentatively. He wasn't sure if it was better to offer Karim reassurance or to let him rave.

  "It'll look like a bright ball trailing a pendant of purplish blue—" Suddenly Karim's tone changed. "And there they are."

  Jake strained his aging eyes. Yes, there it was, coming toward them just beyond the edge of the black disk, a moving brightness with a long tail, getting brighter every second ... It disappeared behind the edge of the heavy-density disk. Jake felt irrational panic. How would Karim see it?

  But of course Karim wasn't going by sight. His hands touched two of the strange Fur protuberances and his gaze never wavered from his displays. He was going by timing, expressed in the alien units Jake had so sardonically called "furries," waiting for the symbol to come up that Karim had calculated was the right moment. The exact moment the Furs would turn off their drive and detect the human ship, which had once been one of their own. No, Karim was actually waiting for a moment just before that. Karim had to have the ship in motion by then...

  It happened so quickly that Jake wasn't sure it had happened at all. And then he was, and a queer disorienting sickness washed over him ... they had missed.