Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Really? Who are causing more trouble here, the Arabs with their three-centuries-old tradition of stable inheritance of some change but not too much? Or the Chinese with their history of totally remaking politics and culture every forty years or so?”

  Alex was silent. She didn’t know much history of either Arabs or the Chinese.

  “You have a genuinely dangerous situation-in-the-making with the dissidents in Hope of Heaven. You’re blind to how dangerou because you’re blind to Earth history. What Lau-Wah said to Won was totally inadequate. The third thing you’re blind to is how many weapons you have here on Greentrees that you should be readying for war, but instead don’t even regard as weapons.”

  “Like what?” Alex said.

  “Everything I saw today. The solar array concentrates sunlight five hundred times, and the dishes are manually directed. Turn them into the sky, or onto the ground, and you have an unexpected heat weapon. Those new microbes of McBain’s destroyed the firs two poles he inserted into the shaft—didn’t you hear him say that? I asked him what the poles were made of. The microbes ate two the of toughest alloys I know, including the one the hull of my ship made of. Ate metal, in minutes. That’s a weapon.”

  She stared at him.

  “In war, Alex, everything is a weapon. Food is a weapon, in how it’s distributed or not distributed. I don’t mean you should starve out Hope of Heaven, which anyway would be difficult to do on a planet as rich as this. I just mean that you should scrutinize all your resources, both for minimizing violence with the dissidents and waging warfare with the Furs. If you don’t, you could lose it all to the enemy. You’re not even aware of your resources, not all of them. And you should be.

  “After all, you’re the tray-o.”

  Alex sat quietiy for a long moment. Ahead of her the white foamcast buildings of Mira City sparkled in the sunshine. The greenery of the farm and the gorgeous genemod colors of the flowers leaped out from the purple countryside. She could see people, small and purposeful, striding along the nearest streets. Wind turbines on a hill across the river flashed in the breeze.

  You could lose it all.

  “Julian,” she said slowly, “I want you to attend all meetings of the triumvirate from now on. I’ll fix it with Ashraf and Lau-Wah. From now on, you advise us.”

  It was only later, in the middle of another sleepless night, that Alex wondered about the meeting at Hope of Heaven. “Inadequate,” Julian had called Lau-Wah’s rebukes to the dissident vandals. But Julian hadn’t been at the meeting; he’d been wandering around Hope of Heaven, returning late to the car.

  So how had he known what Lau-Wah had said to Yat-Shing Wong?

  A week later Julian laid out his plans for the defense of Mira City at a special meeting of the full city council. Alex scanned the faces of the council members: Quaker, Chinese, and Anglo men and women; Arab men. Most of the councillors, busy with their own jobs and families and lives, were used to meeting hastily a few times a year to agree to whatever the triumvirate put in front of them. This meeting was different, and the faces looked solemn, wary, scared. The Furs were such an old threat; many of the councillors had not even been born when the aliens had last appeared on Greentrees. And Julian, flanked by his chief aides and scientists but wearing Threadmores, probably looked to them almost as alien as the almost mythical Furs.

  Alex’s gaze found Jake and Lau-Wah, whose expressions of noncommittal reserve were so identical that, under other circumstances, she might have laughed. She went to sit beside Jake. From there she could view the audience without drawing attention to her scrutiny.

  Ashraf began with a little clearing of his throat. “You all know why we’re here. Commander Martin has some… some defense plans to show us. For Mira City.” He considered. “And the rest of Greentrees. Ah, Commander Martin.” Ashraf sat down on Alex’s other side.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Julian said easily, and Alex noted that although he had dressed like a Greenie, he spoke with the formality of a Terran. What would the council make of that combination?

  “As most of you know, my team has spent the last week talking to you all, learning about the tremendous resources and talent here in Mira City. I want to thank you all for everything you’ve told us. If Terra had been this cooperative and this rich, she might not have got herself into the terminal state she has.”

  Julian was silent a moment. Pain flickered across his face. Beside Alex, Jake muttered, “Very nice. Flattery tempered by a stoic-but-visible bid for sympathy. He’s good.”

  “Shut up,” Alex whispered.

  “I’d like to start by listing all of Mira’s resources,” Julian said. “Please bear with me if I recite things you all already know. I hope to be able to show how they will relate to two things: defending Mira when the Furs attack”—when, Alex noted, not if—“and contributing to all our safety through a city-wide evacuation that gives first priority to protecting your children.”

  A ripple ran over the audience. This was the first that most of them had heard about an evacuation. Julian discussed that first, mentioning the children over and over. The children’s safety, feeding the children, keeping the enemy from seizing even one child, preparing for the return of the children after the attack had been repulsed.

  As Julian talked, Alex felt herself drawn in. Julian’s plans were detailed and direct. It would require an enormous, temporary diversion of resources from the day-to-day running of Mira, but the evacuation seemed possible.

  Julian spoke more, and it seemed advantageous.

  He spoke more, and it seemed necessary.

  Around her, Alex could feel the council members drawn in. A few nodded, or spoke in low voices to each other. She turned her head to glance at Jake; his expression told her nothing.

  Julian said, “That’s the evacuation plan. But of course it does no good to get everyone out of the city if we then let the Furs take it. But we will not permit that to happen. While the evacuation occurs— in fact, from the first moment a Fur ship is sited—the defense strategy begins. I’d like to have my ship’s captain start by explaining possible orbital defenses that—”

  “One moment, please, Commander Martin,” Lau-Wah said. “Before you go any further, I’d like to ask some questions.”

  “Certainly,” Julian said warmly, but a little chill ran over Alex.

  “I’ve listened to your plans for this ’evacuation.’ They’re very convincing. But they leave out a crucial point. All these ’rich resources’ you’re diverting from Mira

  City will make it very difficult to keep the city running day to day. Manufacturing will be disrupted, mining, transport, food production, even education of our young. Instead, everything will be concentrated on evacuation and, I presume, defense.”

  Alex saw a few heads nod around the room.’

  “Not everything,” Julian said pleasantly. “If I’ve given that impression, please let me correct—”

  “Concentrated on evacuation and defense,” Lau-Wah interrupted, most uncharacteristically. “And also concentrated in your hands, not ours.”

  A mistake. Alex realized it as soon as Lau-Wah spoke, and sensed that he did, too. Julian had shown nothing but concern for Mira City, for all Greenies… there wasn’t a “your” and “our” here! Why was Lau-Wah trying to make divisions where they didn’t exist?

  Just as Hope of Heaven was doing.

  Immediately she pushed away the thought. Lau-Wah was in an entirely different category from the dissident troublemakers, Lau-Wah was as concerned about Mira as any of them, it wasn’t jealousy of Julian that drove Lau-Wah, it wasn’t…

  Julian said nothing, standing dignified and silent.

  Finally a young Chinese councilwoman, color high on her cheeks, said, “I think Commander Martin is concerned not with… with power but with all our safety.”

  Murmurs of assent ran around the room. Then someone in the back called, “Mr. Holman, what do you think?”


  Alex swiveled to look at Jake.

  The old man said, “I’d like to hear the rest of the defense plans.” People nodded. Jake’s voice had been steady and neutral. But Alex knew. Jake had always been the one to want a strong defense of Mira. He liked what he’d heard so far, and if Julian could present counterattack plans with the same careful plausibility that he’d presented evacuation plans, and with the same humility, Jake would lend the weight of his approval to Julian’s strategies.

  “Thank you, Mr. Holman,” Julian said quietly, with obvious deference. He began his defense presentation. Alex had heard most of it before, starting with what he’d told her on their first trip out to the solar array, to Jen McBain’s camp, to Hope of Heaven.

  As soon as the discussion of orbital and ground weapons began, the Quaker members of the council slipped from the room. They would, Alex knew, return when a vote was taken. She guessed they would vote for the evacuation, against the counterattack. There were not enough of them to carry the decision.

  Julian had prevailed.

  Jake was nodding openly now as Julian talked. So did several others. But when Alex searched for Lau-Wah, she couldn’t find him. He must have slipped out quietly along with the Quakers.

  Her stomach knotted, although she would have found it difficult to explain exactly why.

  9

  A VINE PLANET

  Karim had taken to whistling.

  Not from lightheartedness, or joy in music, or even the memory of Beta Vine’s pleasure in Karim’s whistling on Greentrees. That memory, in fact, kept him for several days from forming a single note. But finally he whistled just to have a sound, any sound, in the dead silence of the Vine colony world.

  He whistled Grieg.

  Around him the huge, pulpy, unmoving Vines stood soundless.

  He whistled Strauss.

  No echoes came from this world with no hard edges.

  He whistled dance tunes from Earth, Moran and Parakinski and Jerzell, all dead centuries and light-years away.

  The silence stretched on.

  He ran through the Vines, under their protruding lengths that were not leaves nor tentacles nor arms but something alien to him, alien to the music. He ran until he couldn’t whistle, and then until he couldn’t move and had to drop to the squishy mud that was never puddle and never dry. He dropped panting and blind and furious, but he knew fury wouldn’t help. Nothing helped. He was trapped here and he would die here and his and Lucy’s DNA would decay and form the only anomaly on this living world that would not respond to their existence.

  Above him the motionless leaves/tentacles/arms did nothing.

  When he’d regained his breath, Karim again stood. So far his and Lucy’s determination to escape this pulpy hell had come to nothing. But Karim still walked every day, covering enormous distances, afraid not to walk, afraid to sink into more nothingness than he already felt.

  He walked.

  He whistled, from despair, the cheerful rondo from Mozart’s Alla Turca. Dah dah dee dah dah dee…

  Something answered.

  Karim gasped and stumbled. Grabbing the pulpy trunk of a Vine—or the Vine, if they were really all interconnected—he righted himself. Listening.

  Nothing.

  He had imagined it. He must have imagined it.

  With lips that almost trembled too much to purse, he whistled the rondo again.

  Something answered with a single long, high note.

  All the displays on Karim’s suit still worked. Shakily he checked the direction of the received sound and began walking that way. Every hundred yards he whistled again, licking dry lips and holding his breath afterward.

  Each time, something answered.

  He came to it: an irregular pit, maybe fifty meters across at its widest point, less than a meter down to the surface. Karim stepped closer.

  Not water. Not the ubiquitous mud. The pit writhed with a biomass of some sort, a pinkish gray stew of… what? Bacteria, maybe; it looked vaguely like the biofilms that had coated the interior of the first Vine ship. Microorganisms of some alien, unknowable sort, either sentient in their own right or else the servant of the sentient Vines.

  Karim knelt by the edge of the pit and peered in. The biomass stew was opaque; his scrutiny told him nothing. He squatted back on his heels and whistled the Mozart rondo.

  The biomass answered with a single long note.

  He stared at it. A tropism of some kind, automatic and mindless?

  He whistled a dance tune, one of Cazzie Jerzell’s upbeat, simple rhythms.

  The biomass gave him back the tune.

  Karim’s eyes widened. He tried Chopin, a minor-key and difficult fragment. The pit answered with the single long note. Another Jerzell ditty, and it sang it back to him. Grieg, and the single note. Which, he realized, meant no. The pit wanted the Jerzell. He was whistling to an alien life form with lousy musical taste.

  “What are you?” he whispered to it.

  Nothing.

  For the next half hour, until his lips would no longer pucker, Karim whistled. He tried to construct his experiment rationally, but too many emotions swamped him: relief, exhilaration, desperate hope. Something on this planet was responding to him.

  He learned that if he whistled bright dance tunes, the mass rippled softly. If he sat silent with folded arms, it gave a low soft note until he began again. If he whistled anything complex or subtle, the pit sounded its high long no.

  “You hear me, yes,” Karim said hoarsely at the end of what had to be the strangest impromptu concert in the universe. “You at least hear me.”

  He brought Lucy, and the translator. Neither was any help. Lucy’s apathy had grown until it was difficult to get her to move to the pit at all. When she saw it, she stared for a full silent minute, and then said, “It’s just bacteria, like on the ship. So what?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Annoyed, he took the translator from her, set it at the edge of the pit, and spoke into it for a good hour.

  The pit answered only with its low insistent note demanding whistling.

  Karim was frightened by the force of his rage. He saw it as a sign of how unbalanced this place had made him. He forced himself to go on speaking, setting the translator on the ground beside a towering Vine whose fronds dipped into the biomass below.

  Neither pit nor Vine answered him.

  “Damn them for infidels and whores!” Karim screamed. The rage broke. He grabbed the translator and hurled it into the pit, where it sank silently.

  Karim and Lucy looked at each other, petrified.

  But nothing happened. And that, he thought in despair, was the slogan of this planet. Slogan, motto, operating system, epitaph: Nothing happened.

  “Look,” Lucy whispered. “Oh, Karim … look!”

  He turned to follow her pointing finger. A few meters along the perimeter of the pit, very close to its edge, something was growing. At first a blob, it slowly— how slowly, like everything else here! — took on form. It was a small Vine, about six feet high. Then it was a Vine with two long fronds and a bulbous growth on top. The trunk divided. It was, Karim thought dazedly, like watching a speeded-up holo of a plant growing and flowering. An hour later—at least he thought it took an hour, he forgot to time it—the Vine was shaped recognizably, built from living molecules, a representation crude but unmistakable, grown from the sludge in the pit.

  Karim was staring at a sculpted plantlike creature that was himself.

  As he stared, the creation began to whistle: Cazzie Jerzell’s catchy dance tune “Under the April Moon.”

  Karim and Lucy circled the pit, stopping a few feet from the creature/sculpture/music box. Up close, it looked even cruder. Its “lips,” an open circle of pulpy purple, didn’t move as the whistiing sounds emerged. But something, Karim thought dazedly, must be moving inside.

  He said inanely, “Whistling sounds are easy to produce. Even wind does it.”

  Lucy gasped, “Is it alive?”

 
“I don’t know. I mean, yes, it’s alive, it’s a plant as much as the Vines are plants, but… but I don’t think it’s sentient. Of itself.”

  “No,” Lucy said. She looked from the whistling arboreal Karim to the pit, then to a nearby Vine, then back to the pit. “Karim …”

  “What?” This was the most animation he’d seen from her in weeks.

  “I think we have it wrong. Here, on the Vine ship, even on Greentrees.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think… no, wait.” She closed her eyes, as if in pain. He waited.

  “I think,” she finally said, “that we were wrong when we assumed that Beta’s biofilm arm was under his control on Greentrees. Or that the Vines on the ship controlled all that biofilm covering the floor. Or that these Vines here are master of this planet. I think we were wrong. The Vines are just machinery. Like our translators and computers and ships and skinsuits. Or maybe like the genemod working animals on Earth. Horses, maybe. The biofilm controls the Vines, not the other way around. The biofilm is the sentient master of this race.

  “All this time we’ve been talking to the wrong end of the horse.”

  10

  MIRA CITY

  It came ripping through the sky, a huge black disk growing larger and larger and larger still, until it stretched horizon to horizon, shrieking metal and wailing wind. The bottom opened and re spilled out, a trickle at first, growing to a silent torrent. The red liquid flooded the streets of Mira City, higher and higher. People screamed and thrashed, faces contorted with terror as they went under, drowning in blood …

  Alex woke and bolted upright on her cot. Sweat soaked her pajamas. Panting, she recoiled as a furry missile landed on the bed. Katous.

  “Bad dream, cat.”

  Katous stared at her in the darkness, two impassive yellow eyes. “Very bad dream.” She pushed away her blanket; no more sleep tonight. Evacuation drill day, starting in less than half an hour. Well, for her it wouldn’t be a surprise night drill. Probably there were a lot more people awake who were supposed to be taken by “surprise.”

  One of them was Jake who, since his last stroke, was now apparently installed permanently in her apartment with a strong male nurse. At least it might be permanently; Alex wasn’t home much Siddalee had grudgingly supplemented the cot in Alex’s office wit a shower. Tonight, however, Jake’s nurse had moved into Jake’s bedroom, and Alex had slept at her “evacuation drill home point.”