Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (14 page)

“Nan Frayne did. My scientists tracked her down in their wilderness in the southern subcontinent. You gave permission for my biologists to do that, you know. The triumvirate did.”

True. But Alex hadn’t expected the Terran scientists to succeed. She’d assumed that Nan would reject them, just as Nan had rejected all overtures from Mira’s own scientists.

Alex said to Ashraf, “Without Julian’s intervention, the Hope of Heaven rebels would have done much more damage.”

“I know.”

Julian said, “What are you going to do with them?”

Alex liked that. Julian had met her and Ashraf’s interrogation forthrightly, saw when he’d been forgiven his secrecy, and now was not eager to lap up praise, even justified praise. Her respect for him grew.

Ashraf said, “The rebels will be charged with their crime. We don’t have prisons, you know—we can’t afford the resources or personnel. After a software trial, they’ll be flown in the skimmer to a distant, sea-locked island with more than enough supplies for basic survival and left there.”

“For how long?”

“That depends on the outcome of the trial.”

It was what the Mira City law said, although such exile had never been actually done before. Alex tried not to flinch from the bleakness of the pictures in her mind: a few people, primitive huts, predatory animals, carefully hoarded medical supplies that must eventually run out.

Julian said, “And the rest of the dissidents in Hope of Heaven?”

Alex answered. “I don’t know if you understand our legal system, Julian. It’s probably different than what you knew on Earth before you left. We’re built on the old English system of presumption of innocence. If the rebels who tried to burn Mira tell us that others were involved, or the others tell us they were, or the software finds evidence they were, then more people can be tried. If not, we can’t blame or punish the others in Hope of Heaven, because how would we know who was part of the attack and who wasn’t? We might punish innocent people. So only those seven we caught will be tried.”

Julian looked from Ashraf to her, then out the window. Four stories below, children played in the park. Their shouts rose faintly on the sweet twilight air wafting through the window. In the dusk a few lights came on, then a few more. Mira City was coming back to electronic life.

“You’re right,” Julian said. “It’s different from what I knew on Earth.”

“Cai,” Duncan said softly, “what are you doing?”

He said sharply, “Don’t call me that.”

“Julian, then. What, my dear brother, are you doing?”

“Just what you see. Go to bed, Duncan. Even you need an hour of sleep at night.”

“As I thought you did, but I seldom see you actually do it.”

Julian looked up from the screen propped on the foamcast table. The small apartment held nothing of Julian but his computer, on loan from Mira City, and four sets of clothes: two Terran uniforms and two Greentrees Threadmores, one of which he wore now. The rest of the closet, both narrow beds, three of four chairs, and much of the floor was heaped with Duncan’s costumes, printed scripts, music cubes, notes, and props, a fantastic array of centuries, climes, and characters. A tricorne rested on a toga, red tights on armor, a gold-embroidered robe on a worn dark cloak. Duncan’s new theater would be foamcast soon, and all this would move there, including Duncan.

He said in his musical voice, “I ask again, what are you doing with these people? No, don’t repeat ’Just what you see.’ I am not a moron, nor are you innocence, ’with naught to dread.’”

“I am helping these people,” Julian said, without looking up from his screen.

“To do what?”

Julian switched off the screen, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “Good night, Duncan. I’m going for a walk.”

“To the home of the lamentably plain and idealistic Alex? Now,
there
is an innocent.” He peered closer at Julian. “Good God, you genuinely like her!”

“Yes. I do.”

“I am amazed. I am astonished. I am several other adjectives beginning with ’a.’ You genuinely like this planet, too, don’t you, this primitive unsceptered isle?”

Julian didn’t answer. But for a moment his green eyes blazed, like a sudden burst from a laser. He went out into the scented night.

A VINE PLANET

W
hen darkness fell, Lucy and Karim did not return to their metal box. Instead they stayed beside the pit, lying with their arms around each other in a small clearing, gazing up at the clouded opaque sky. Lucy had left her powertorch on, and the fronds of nearby towering Vines looked like dark solid ghosts.

“Ghosts of sentience,” she said, and shuddered.

“We can use this, Lucy,” Karim said, more confidently than he felt.

“How?”

“The biomass responds to us, which is more than the Vines do.”

“A Vine spoke when we first got here, through the translator,” Lucy argued. “So if everything really is interconnected, then the biomass already knew about us. But it didn’t help us then.”

“I know. But it hadn’t
seen
us. Or maybe it just… how would I know? But I think now I can bargain with it. Watching it make that thing, that plant that looked like me… I remembered something.”

“What?”

He’d been saving this since he thought of it, almost reluctant to say it aloud, turning the thought over and over like a small boy with a smooth stone. Running his fingers over the polished surface that might hide anything inside.

“The biomass
grew
that plant image of me, the way it must grow the Vines. The way it grew those smaller, mobile versions of Vines that came to Greentrees, including Beta Vine. It can manufacture molecules, the way it manufactures our food or even the microbe we infected the Furs with. To do that, it must have genetic blueprints, or something like that, stored in its cells.”

“Yeeesssss,” Lucy said slowly, “or if not in its cells, then in the connections among them, like among brain cells … I don’t know. George always said that even on Earth biofilms are full of substructures and capable of enormous plasticity.”

“True. Back on Greentrees, Beta Vine gave Dr. Shipley something, and then—

“The ’death flowers’!” Lucy breathed. “Jake had them put inside the quee when the Furs captured us! But what happened to them after that?”

“I don’t know. We got too sick with the virus to care. And then afterward, when we recovered and the Furs got sick, it didn’t seem important. You and I went out in space to deliver the infectious Furs. I imagine the ’death flowers’ went back to Greentrees with Jake and Dr. Shipley.”

“Dr. Shipley would have taken good care of them,” Lucy said with sudden conviction. “He promised Beta Vine. Beta told him that the death flowers were the souls of himself and the other Vines that the Furs killed, and they needed to be returned—”

She stopped abruptly.

“To the ’genetic library,’” Karim finished. “I think the death flowers were genetic blueprints to re-create Beta and the others, their individual consciousness, or whatever the equivalent is for Vines. Beta emphasized how important they were to his race.”

Lucy lay silent. Karim could feel her slight tremor in his arms. He tightened his hold.

She said, “Important enough to trade for our passage home?”

“I don’t know.”

She cried out in sudden anguish, “But you threw the translator into the pit!”

“I don’t think it matters. Either it’s still down there, or we’ll work out a code. With whistles, maybe. Or knocks on the ground. We already know from Greentrees that they can understand pictures we draw.”

“What if Dr. Shipley and Jake have both died? Decades have passed on Greentrees since we left, you know. Or at least will have passed by the time we get back. Our … the new generation could have thrown away the death flowers.”

“I don’t think scientists would do that. But even so, the chance of the flowers being there might be enough to get us home.”

“When do we tell the Vines? Should we—” Lucy screamed.

A huge frond came swooping down from thirty feet above them. Its shadow fell like some monstrous bird of prey across the circle of light cast by the powertorch. Before Karim could react, the tentacle had snaked around his wrist and yanked him to his feet. Lucy, too, was jerked upright.

“Come,” said the monotonous, uninflected voice of the translator, a second before Karim saw it floating on the surface of the pit ten meters away. “Go.”

“Where are we going?”

“You go home. We get death flowers. We go your planet.”

The tentacles/fronds/biofilm living machines were pulling him along into the darkness. Lucy barely had time to stoop and snatch up the powertorch. The Vines handed him along, passed from Vine to Vine, like a pail in an old-fashioned bucket brigade. It was the fastest that Karim had ever known the aliens to do anything.

From hastily glimpsed particular configurations of Vines, confirmed by his suit compass, Karim knew that they were being moved back to the metal box. Human home base on this Vine world. The drop-off place from the ship’s shuttle. And, presumably, its pickup site as well.

Thank you, Allah.

A
lex sat at her desk, frowning at her screen, which displayed a report from Savannah Cutler at the solar array. The report, written in Savannah’s usual scientific jargon, heavy with mathematics and light on explanations, seemed to be giving much increased power outages, along with elaborate projections for results from new operations. Alex hadn’t authorized any resources for new operations. But Savannah’s esoteric jottings somehow conveyed a sense of definite satisfaction, in itself alarming. Alex was halfway through when Siddalee Brown appeared in the doorway.

“Yes. What is it? I’m busy, Siddalee, this report from the solar array is gibberish. Why can’t Savannah … it seems to say…” Siddalee said nothing.

Silence from Siddalee was as unusual as satisfaction from Savannah, so Alex looked up. Siddalee slumped against the foamcast doorway. Her brown skin looked ashy, the color of half-burned tialin leaves. Alex jumped up.

“Siddalee! Are you all right? Do you need—”

“Lau-Wah Mah is dead.”

Something pierced Alex’s stomach. “No, he can’t be,” she said stupidly. “I’d know. Guy Davenport would have told—”

“Guy’s outside, on his comlink. Emergency report, he’s coming right in. Lau-Wah … they did things to him … he was tortured. I… he …” Siddalee began to cry.

Alex tried to help her to a chair, but Siddalee shook her off and went out of the room, sobbing and ashamed of sobbing. Mira’s security chief appeared in her place, comlink still in hand.

No. It can’t be. No.

“Alex,” Guy said, and she knew it was so.

A strange calm took her then, a numb automatic response system. “What happened, Guy?”

“Some kids found the body on Moonthorn Bluff. About an hour ago.”

Alex nodded. The bluff, a few miles upriver from Mira, was a popular place for hikes and picnics. The eco team had long ago cleared it of dangerous native plants like red creeper, installed underground supersonic transmitters that scared away large predators, and even planted a few hearty, genemod Terran fruit trees. A corpse could not stay there very long without being discovered.

Guy continued, “There was a heavy rain yesterday; he was dumped there sometime during the storm, probably in the middle of the night. Somebody wanted him found, and also wanted any tracks erased by rain. Alex, he was tortured pretty brutally.”

“How? No, don’t tell me yet. In a while. Soon.” She wasn’t making sense. “What else?”

“Beside him on the ground was one of those twisted iron bars in the shape of that Chinese character. Hope.”

“Too easy,” she said instantly. “If Hope of Heaven did it—”

“Who else could have?” Guy said, a sudden flash of anger on his placid middle-aged face.

“I don’t know. Let me think.” She couldn’t think.

Guy came closer and put a hand on Alex’s desk, to steady himself or to emphasize his point. “If you want to make a … I don’t know what you’d call it… an action people have to take seriously—”

“A political statement,” Alex said. She’d learned the phrase from Julian.

“Yes. Then you might do it this way. They’re cocky now, those bastards in Hope of Heaven. We didn’t go after them for the river-encampment attack, we didn’t go after them for the evacuation-drill burnings, all we did was ship out a few low-level people. Now they think they can get away with anything!”

So Guy had already decided that Hope of Heaven was guilty.

They probably are, Alex thought through her numbness. Why didn’t she want to admit it?

Because she didn’t want to believe something like this could happen in Mira. Had happened.

All of a sudden, with every fiber of her body and mind, she wanted to talk to Jake.

“Guy, what is your team doing? What have you already done? Where’s … where’s Lau-Wah?”

“I had him taken to the crematorium. I called out my entire force on Mira patrol. I closed the road to all traffic to and from Hope of Heaven: road, river, air.”

Alex wasn’t sure that was legal. She said, “I’m calling an emergency meeting right now. Siddalee! Get Ashraf here, and the council and league heads, and Julian Martin. I’m going to get Jake Holman myself.”

“Jake? Why do you want—”

“Because I do!” Alex snapped. “I’ll be back in ten minutes!”

At a dead run, her apartment was only a few minutes from the Mausoleum; it was why she’d chosen it. Passersby stared to see their tray-o, red wrap hiked nearly to her hips, sprinting along the paths bordered by bright genemod flowers. But on a few faces, Alex glimpsed comprehension, plus something else. These were the people who had already heard about Lau-Wah; the kids who found him might easily have been been hysterical. The something else was fury.

She was gasping for breath when she burst through her own door. A neighbor stood, in tears, beside Jake’s powerchair. She saw that the old man already knew.

“Alex,” he said softly, indistinctly, the thin flesh on his face a sagging map of sorrow. “So it’s started. We hoped, Gail and I and Shipley, that on Greentrees it never would.

“Wasn’t that stupid of us?”

The meeting couldn’t be held in Ashraf’s serene office, under the bright copper plates and woven rugs. Eighty-eight people came or were summoned to the Mausoleum in the next half hour, far too many for the small office. Siddalee cleared and closed off the ground floor and had chairs carried in from anywhere chairs were to be found. People were there who probably had no right to be, but no one thought of that until later. There were no precedents. For fifty years there had not been a murder on Greentrees. The few—very few—serious assaults had all been personal, people with grudges against each other of love or family or property or something else horrifying but small.

This, everyone sensed, was not small.

Present was the full council, made up of the heads of the city sections. Since the various ethnic groups in Mira tended to live together, sections followed ethnic divisions. The Anglos and Chinese elected their councillors; the Arabs appointed theirs; Alex wasn’t sure what the New Quakers did. The council was ordinarily a part-time, rubber-stamp bunch. Most civic concerns were taken care of by internal ethnic leaders, also now present, or by negotiation among the corporate and Mira City’s corporate and municipal chiefs.

Those were all present, too. Mining Consortium, Scientists’ League, Ecoadaptation, Farming, SunSec, Chu Corporation, Maubrey Limited, MiraNet, Cutler Enterprises. Alex, up front with Ashraf and Guy, looked out at a mixture of costumes she had not seen since the fiftieth First Landing celebration. Gray Quaker Threadmores. White Arab robes. A sea of brightiy colored wraps tied a hundred different ways over black skinthins or, among the young, bare flesh. Jake sat in the back in his wheelchair, his knees covered with an ancient blue blanket that might, Alex suspected, have even come from Terra.