Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  Natalie gasped. Alex’s attention snapped back to the audio comlink report.

  “—shooting fire out of the nozzle! I’ve never seen anything—”

  “Where the hell did they get flamethrowers?” Julian’s voice demanded.

  “Who?” Alex cried.

  “—fire at the hospital! It’s caught fire …”

  The hospital was one of the third-generation buildings that Alex had been so proud to show Julian: graceful soaring wood, beauty to comfort the ill and dying.

  It had been built last year, to replace the utilitarian foamcast hospital. It stood at the very edge of Mira City, at the very edge of the EMP range.

  “Who?” Alex demanded again.

  “Hope of Heaven,” Natalie said.

  Abruptly a visual display came to life. Alex watched, frozen, as masked figures ran away from the hospital. Behind them, red and yellow flames danced gaily over the purplish wood of the graceful building. The airy rooms, Alex thought, where the sick could gaze out on the bright genemod flower beds. The meditation chapel, the operating rooms, the children’s wing…

  A blackened beam crashed to the ground, dragging with it part of a wall.

  “—This is Jenson Cutler just arrived back in Mira City for MiraNet,” said a shaky voice, “sending from the roof of a building to… to all of you. Masked people are burning the hospital… no, now they’re shooting flames at another building down the street, I don’t know what it is…” The robocam swiveled and Alex saw flames—so gorgeous, so cheerful looking!—hit another curved, soaring structure.

  “SecSun Mining,” she said aloud, to no one.

  The building burned as joyously as the hospital.

  “I’m going in,” said another voice on another channel. “They can’t just—”

  “Do not advance!” came Guy Davenport’s voice, more decisive than Alex had ever heard it. “You have no weapons. Stay where you are; that’s an order.”

  “But they’re… oh my God!”

  “Sweet gravy Allah,” came Jenson Cutler’s voice, and Alex barely had time to note with some numb, inane part of her mind that her young third cousin had used a bastardized Arab oath before the robocam turned for yet another view.

  Furs were running down the street.

  When did the enemy land?

  But of course they weren’t space Furs. A moment later, the longest moment of her life, Alex realized her mistake. The Furs running toward the flamethrowers were Nan Frayne’s wild Furs, inexplicably invading a temporarily prechip Mira City. The Hope of Heaven rebels—as the robocam zoomed in, Alex could see the Chinese character on their masks—turned the flamethrowers toward the Furs. The young humans weren’t fast enough. The Furs darted behind foamcast buildings. They moved with incredible speed.

  A spear arced through the air and caught a rebel in the chest.

  Alex was back in the genetics lab, watching another spear fly into a midair lion, Nan Frayne’s voice in her ear: “There’s a ship approaching Greentrees… you better go find out. I’ve got better things to do.”

  Spears and lances were not affected by an EMP.

  Another rebel went down, impaled through the chest, still screaming. The robocam swiveled wildly. Incoherent shouting, and then two more rebels dropped their flamethrowers and clapped their hands on top of their heads in surrender.

  Then two more.

  Alex stumbled toward the display for a closer look. Later, it seemed to her that it had all happened during that one clumsy step forward, although of course it couldn’t have been that compressed. But that’s the way she remembered it. Guy Davenport’s security force rushing forward, taking the rebels prisoner. People spraying water on the fires; the pumping stations were not, thank heavens, computer controlled. And Nan Frayne’s Furs melting away, disappearing as completely as if they had never been there at all, had been as hypothetical as the space Furs’ ship, their shuttle, the nonexistent attack on a city not quite empty enough.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Ashraf demanded of Julian. The small man in his rumpled Threadmores looked surprisingly dignified. He neither fidgeted nor glanced around distractedly. His dark eyes stayed fixed on Julian’s, and in them Alex saw less personal offense at being deposed than impersonal concern for the truth.

  “Julian, If you brought in Nan Frayne and her Furs to protect Mira City, we should have known. Alex, Lau-Wah, and Guy, at a minimum.”

  At the mention of Lau-Wah, Alex bit her lip. Lau-Wah had never reported in to his bunker. He was still missing.

  Julian said, “Ms. Frayne made it a condition of her cooperation that I tell no one. She said that was nonnegotiable. I believed her.”

  Alex believed it, too.

  Julian continued, “I didn’t know, of course, that Hope of Heaven would choose the Mira City drill to attack. I was protecting us against as many contingencies as I could. That’s a strategy we had discussed and agreed on.”

  “Us.” Julian counted himself as one of them.

  They were meeting in the Mausoleum, whose chips had been the first to be replaced. Ashraf’s office, unlike Alex’s, was painfully neat, and unexpectedly cheerful for the stark foamcast building. Bright woven rugs and hammered copper plates from Terra, precious antiques, hung on the white foamcast walls. Another rug, green with a geometric design, covered the floor. The basic foamcast furniture had been softened with cushions. Holo cubes of Ashraf’s children played on his desk. The room had the warmth that Siddalee was always complaining Alex’s office lacked, although Siddalee was no better at creating it than Alex herself.

  She said to Julian, “How did you get Nan Frayne to post her Furs as guards? Those creatures have always resisted having anything to do with any human except her. They’re as xenophobic as the space Furs.”

  Julian said, “They haven’t ever understood before that the space Furs who destroyed their villages and much of their populace fifty years ago might return and finish the job.”

  Ashraf said, “And how did you make them understand that?”

  “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 at
tack 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

  When 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.

  12 MIRA CITY

  Alex 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 n
othing.

  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—”