Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  Karim bolted upright. He heard it then: yelling so heartstopping that instinctively he strained against his bonds. The human yelling was followed by even louder noises that clearly were not human.

  “My God,” whispered Jon. “What’s happening out there?”

  Kueilan said, “It could be a wild Fur attack.”

  The five of them sat there in the darkness, unable to see one another until Jon fumbled the powertorch on.

  “Kent, can you see out the door?”

  “No, I—”

  The inflatable door ripped open. A wild Fur darted inside, spear raised high. Karim saw the thing clearly, teeth bared and crest raised. I’m going to die. He groped for Lucy’s hand, hoping numbly that being impaled was quick, please Allah let it not take too long…

  “Karim?” a voice said incredulously. “Karim Mahjoub?”

  A wiry old woman dressed in animal pelts, her skin as rough as the pelts under cropped gray hair, her strong arms holding a spear, stared at Karim. “Lucy? Lucy Lasky?”

  “Who … who …” Karim stammered.

  “My God,” Lucy whispered. “It’s Nan Frayne.”

  Nan Frayne? But Nan was a girl, barely out of her teens, she’d gone with them and Jake on their first trip off-planet, Karim had seen her only…

  Only thirty-nine years ago.

  “So you’re back,” Nan said, amused. She’d regained her composure; Karim had not. “What a stupid place to turn up. Get out of here, all of you.” She said something to the wild Fur, who vanished. The yelling outside had stopped. Nan bent and deftly cut their bonds, one after the other.

  “What is—”

  “War is. My people are avenging themselves.”

  Nan vanished from the inflatable. Pulling Lucy to her feet, Karim followed Kent outside.

  It was a moonless night. But by the Cheyenne’s fire, burning bright, Karim could clearly see the bodies. The braves lay where they had fallen, one holding a bow but the others unarmed. Karim smelled burning flesh.

  Burning, not pierced.

  Karim stumbled closer. The brave lay face upward, his eyes open. In the middle of his chest was a laser burn, smoking away the clothing in a neat round hole and burning through to the heart. Two wild Furs hovered just beyond the firelight. They held guns in their hands.

  Nan Frayne smiled at him. She made a strange, alien noise in her throat, and the Furs moved toward the bodies.

  “You don’t want to see this,” Nan said with malicious defiance to Karim and Lucy. “My Furs aren’t human, remember. And they’re carnivores. I suggest you follow the river downstream until you reach Mira City. You’ll be all right. I’ve told the Furs not to touch you as long as you stick to the river. Our war isn’t with you.”

  “You’re insane,” Lucy gasped to Nan.

  She smiled again. “Better get going, little Lucy. Give my regard to Jake if he hasn’t croaked yet.”

  Karim grabbed Lucy’s hand and pulled her away. The five humans stumbled in the dark toward the river. Karim could hear it, rushing downhill beyond a dark strand of trees.

  They had just reached the woods, scratched and torn from underbrush, when the entire research station lit up like day. Karim could just see startled Furs raise their heads from the bodies on the ground. Above, the source of the light but itself a black shape against the stars, a craft slid silently down the sky.

  “A shuttle,” Lucy breathed. “The Vines!”

  “Or the Furs,” Jon said. “The real ones. It—” He fell silent.

  Karim strained his eyes into the darkness. Small branched crossed his field of vision, dark lacy lines. For the rest of his life he remembered what he saw next as seen through those twigs, as if the scene were indivisible from that intricate living mesh. As if it could somehow screen him.

  The shuttle landed, egg shaped with a long flexible tail, as were both Fur and Vine shuttles. Instantly the door opened. Armed Furs strode out, completely clad in clear space suits. Karim had not, whenever he’d encountered Furs, ever seen them wear anything except weapon sashes. These warriors were dressed as if they feared vacuum—or contamination.

  The wild Furs stood still for a long moment, eerily frozen by this, their first look at their cousins from another world, another infinitely more technologically advanced time. The two with laser guns dangled them limply by their furred sides. The ones with spears held them poised aloft, unmoving until it was too late.

  One of the space Furs must have done something. Every wild Fur crumpled to the ground, Nan Frayne with them. Without so much as breaking stride, the Furs picked up their primitive kin and carried them into the shuttle. Nan Frayne they left on the ground. The shuttle door closed.

  Karim said shakily, “The infection worked. The Furs are in negative-pressure space suits so nothing can contaminate them. The ones we left must have infected others with the virus, or how would these Furs suspect that either wild Furs or humans might still be able to harm them with microbes? We did it, Lucy, the infection has reached more of the space Furs—”

  The entire research camp disappeared.

  The shuttle’s flexible tail moved slowly in an encompassing arc, and as it went, everything before it disappeared. Inflatables, pole leading down to the biomass, foamcast buildings, Cheyenne tents, fire and drying racks and the dead braves. And the body of Nan Frayne. Gone, as if it never existed.

  No one spoke.

  The shuttle lifted, and it was halfway up the sky before Jon McBain gasped, “I… I never saw anything like that before!”

  Karim said grimly, “We did. Fifty years ago the Furs destroyed all the wild Fur villages in the same way. I mean, the wild Furs that had been created to test other versions of the Vine viruses to render them passive. The space Furs called them ’blasphemies’ and wiped them out and their villages just like that.”

  Kueilan gave a small moan. She said, “If they use that thing on Mira City…”

  Jon demanded, “But they didn’t destroy the wild Furs! Why not, if what you say is true and last time they destroyed all the ’blasphemies’?”

  Karim was thinking as fast as he could. “Maybe because these aren’t blasphemies. They were the Vines’ control group. They’re whole and sound and the Furs want them—”

  “Why?”

  It was Lucy who answered. “Maybe for breeding stock. Maybe the Vine plan worked really well and the virus is spreading across their home world and even their colonies! Maybe they plan to use those males to reach more females because they need a larger gene pool. They know that they didn’t get the control group last time because so many wild Furs were off hunting, not in the village when the space Furs wiped it out. Maybe our plan worked!”

  “I hope so,” Karim said. “But now the space Furs are here again. They want their uninfected cousins and I’m afraid they want…” He couldn’t say it.

  “Greentrees,” Lucy said. He saw that she was following his line of thought and that she had to say it aloud, for her own sake. To get it out of her vulnerable mind, like a dangerous predator flushed into the open.

  “The space Furs want… want G-Greentrees. Because they know that the virus isn’t here among the wild Furs. They can see that— the wild Furs aren’t passive and helpless. And Greentrees has air the Furs can breathe, has enough shared DNA to colonize. It… it’s rich and lush and mostly empty. It’s a prime colonization world for… for this uninfected group of Furs. Except… except…”

  “Except for us,” Karim said. “Except for humans.”

  25

  A HOSPITAL CAVE

  The teenage girl whom Siddalee Brown had put in charge of Jake didn’t accompany him to his evacuation end point, as Siddalee had told her to. Instead the girl brought him as far as his designated transport, the stripped-down tram, and turned him over to the civilian sector captain. “This is Mr. Holman, he goes on here, I still have time to get to my own transport!” she screamed cheerfully over the siren. “Be careful with him, there’s something wrong with him! He drools!�
� She ran off, waving back over her shoulder, a young careless figure excited by the unusual.

  Something wrong with him. He drools.

  Jake realized all at once that he had been a fool to try to talk to the girl, to let her see he was coherent. He was supposed to have had a massive debilitating stroke, and after the evacuation—or during it—Julian’s men might well check to make sure that was true. If it wasn’t, Jake was as dead as Duncan.

  He made himself go floppy in his chair, arms dangling over the side, face blank. Eyes empty. Jake Holman, himself, gone.

  The sector captain, a woman he didn’t know but who of course knew him, looked shocked. From the corner of his deliberately empty eyes, Jake saw tears come to hers. Tenderly she folded his arms across his lap, which made Katous, still in the bag where the girl had tied him, begin clawing and yowling all over again.

  The sirens stopped, leaving a too-spacious silence.

  “What is—a cat!” the captain said. “Oh, Mr. Holman, we can’t bring any animals…” She looked at him again with that sorrowfull tenderness and said softly, “Well, maybe for you an exception, Leanne! You come here and take charge of Mr. Holman. Tie him better in that chair and hold on to it… this tram’s going to start in a minute. From now on he’s your only patient, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Leanne, another teenage girl. The evac team used whomever it could get.

  Jake closed his eyes. How long was he going to have to pretend to be reduced to imbecility? The rest of his life? That wasn’t a life

  If he didn’t pretend to be brain-dead, he also wouldn’t have a life past the moment Julian discovered Jake was coherent.

  If that was a Fur ship coming in, none of them were going to have any life anyway.

  “Let’s go!” the captain shouted. A last patient on a hospital bed was hoisted onto the tram, and it started forward.

  In the end-point cave nothing had changed. Jake couldn’t believe he’d sat there just hours ago with Star Chu and Yenmo Kang. The same cots lined the rough stone walls; the same boxes of medical supplies and evac rations were stacked everywhere. But now the cots were occupied, the boxes being opened. People bustled by his chair. Somewhere behind him some poor soul wailed incessantly, in pain or outrage or bewilderment.

  His new teenage nurse, Leanne, had parked Jake’s chair against the cave wall just inside the safety line. He faced the cave entrance, close enough to smell the brush pulled hastily over it as camouflage. It would fool nobody on the ground but probably looked natural from the air. The brush smelled spicy and clean.

  Purplish leaves quivered in a slight breeze from outside. Katous, the moment he had been let out of his sack, had bolted through the brush and disappeared.

  Leanne said to someone Jake couldn’t see, “How do I feed Mr. Holman? Does he need a tube inserted?”

  Please, no.

  “I don’t know,” a male voice answered. “Try a spoon and see if the swallow reflex is still working.”

  A few minutes later Leanne spooned soysynth into Jake’s mouth. “He can swallow,” she called joyfully over the purposeful low din of patients and caretakers.

  “Good. Get him on a cot… no, wait, he’ll have to stay there a little longer. We got two extras from Mira, somehow. Anybody know what’s happening there? Did Mohammed report in?”

  “No,” Leanne said. Her young voice turned worried. “But if he’d heard anything from Mira, he would have. I wish I knew what was happening back there.”

  So do we all. Finally a Fur attack, after nearly forty years of mostly desultory preparation, and Jake must play a semi-vegetable. What he must do was warn Alex about Julian, he had to get to Alex! He had to—

  He fell asleep.

  When he woke, he lay on a cot in the same position in the cave and it was night. A powertorch farther in lent only a dim gloom up here. The leaves rustled quietly, smelling of Greentrees’ sweet night air, and he dreamed of Lucy Lasky, young as she had been fifty years ago, laying her cool thin hand on his old heart.

  “Jake?” the dream said.

  He mumbled something at the sweet lithe figure and smiled in his sleep.

  “Jake?”

  It wasn’t a dream.

  Jake gasped and struggled to sit up, forgetting that he was supposed to be incapacitated. “Lucy? How—”

  “Karim and I are back. We—”

  “What are you doing here?” someone said sharply. “Who are you? You’re not authorized for this end point!”

  “I’m… never mind. Get me the person in charge.”

  Leanne said eagerly, “Are you from Mira? Is the evac over?”

  “I’m not from Mira. Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am.” The sector captain appeared from the depths of the cave. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lucy Lasky. Karim Mahjoub and I are back from—”

  The woman drew a quick sharp breath. She peered closer. “You are her, aren’t you! Oh my God … My father talked all the time about your plan! Did it work? Are the Furs infected?”

  “Yes. But there are some here on Greentrees who are not. I need to talk to Jake Holman and then this Julian Martin. The situation is desperate.”

  The captain said gently, “Ms. Lasky, talking to Mr. Holman I’m sorry, but he’s had a debilitating stroke. He can no longer hear you or respond.”

  “But—” Lucy began, and Jake put a hand on her thigh. Just a small movement, shielded from the others by Lucy’s thin body, and if she didn’t understand it then she would go to Julian and all of Greentrees could end up destroyed. One little movement of I hand, and everything depended on it, and fuck it to hell, life shouldn’t be that way. But it was.

  “I see,” Lucy said, and her hand briefly pressed his.

  Jake thanked the gods he didn’t believe in.

  “I’ll just sit with him a while, if that’s all right,” Lucy said. “We knew each other a long time ago.”

  “Of course,” the sector captain said. “You can’t reach Commander Martin anyway until the comlinks are open again.” She and Leanne and everyone else left them alone.

  “Jake,” Lucy whispered sorrowfully, “You …” She stopped, embarrassed.

  “I’m old,” he whispered. “What did you expect?”

  She merely shook her head, a slight shape standing beside his cot in the gloom. With the light behind her, Jake couldn’t see her face, but she might be able to make out his. Furrows, white skimpy hair, rheumy sunken eyes. Old.

  She said, “I always loved you, you know. Even though I left with Karim.”

  “Don’t try to make amends for age, Lucy,” he said, and was shocked to hear amusement in his voice. “It can’t be done. What is happening out there? No, don’t look like you’re conversing; I’m supposed to be an imbecile and I’m dead if they find out I’m not.”

  He felt her go still. But in a moment she recovered—Lucy had always had that capacity, Jake remembered, a resilience hidden under her emotionalism. She said in a low voice, “We think the plan worked. We left the infected Furs by the Vine planet, the Vines confirmed that they were picked up, and we believe the infection spread. But now a Fur ship is in orbit. We saw the shuttle land and distroy a Cheyenne camp in the Avery Mountains. They used that same beam we saw before in the shuttle tail. Wild Furs had just attaked the Cheyenne. Nan Frayne is dead.”

  She saw that it was a lot for him to take in, and paused a moment, her head bent. A stronger breeze blew through the fragrant brush. Rain was coming. Jake thought of Nan Frayne, that difficult and enigmatic crusader among a species not her own, and closed his eyes.

  Lucy’s voice continued, “I think the Furs who landed in the shuttle are afraid humans could recontaminate them. They wore units and helmets, which we never saw at all last time. Also, they took the wild Furs in the Cheyenne camp with them. Karim thinks this may be a shipful of Furs who feel cut off from their empire. They risk infection if they go home. He thinks they want the wild furs for a bigger gene pool, and Greent
rees for their own planet, and humans exterminated completely so there’s no further risk of infection to them. Karim sent me to find Julian Ma—”

  “No!”

  Lucy said, “What?”

  “Julian is the one trying to kill me. It’s too long to explain now. But, Lucy, he wants to take over Greentrees, too. He’ll kill me and Alex and probably you. I have to get to Alex to tell her everything!”

  “I don’t think you can go anywhere, Jake.”

  “Just watch me,” he said grimly. “And you’re going to help me. Where’s Karim?”

  “He and Jon McBain—that’s a xenobiologist we were with after the Vines set us down, are—”

  “The Vines?”

  Lucy said, “I need to start at the beginning. I haven’t told you all of it.”

  “Go ahead,” Jake said. “But look like you’re praying aloud or something, and make it as quick as you can.”

  She was not quite halfway through when the outside guard burst through the camouflage brush and turned on a powerlight. In the sudden glare Jake, blinking, saw that the boy was crying. The sector captain rushed up. “Mohammed! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “They got Mira City!” the boy said. “A runner just came, he saw it! The city is … is gone. No buildings, no people, no anything! It just isn’t there, and neither is anybody who can tell what happened!”

  “Oh my God,” the sector captain said. Tears filled her eyes but she said to the boy in a severe tone designed to be bracing, “Go back outside on duty. Keep your comlink open to receive but do not send. Stay hidden yourself, so that you can’t be seen from the air. Mohammed, did you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My parents… they wouldn’t leave Mira this time…”

  “Go now, Mohammed. You’re a soldier. Other lives depend on you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said and blundered out.

  “Mira City gone,” Lucy whispered. “Jake …”

  “Most of the people are out,” he said clearly, loud enough to be heard by the sector captain. She stared at him, astonished through her pain.

  “Captain, I need to get out of here with Lucy Lasky. I can’t explain now, but it’s important. The most important thing in the world right now.” Jake hated sounding sternly melodramatic, but this was the sort of woman who would respond to that—just as she, in turn, had known the boy would.