by Nancy Kress
“Word of what?” Kent said, bewildered.
“I don’t know yet! I won’t know until we establish communication!”
Kueilan and Kent looked at him skeptically; obviously they had been talking over Karim’s ideas and found an objection to it. Probably a lot of objections. Those would also have to wait.
The four of them piled into the rover. Karim saw Kent wrinkle his nose, and ignored it. River water, without soap, could only do so much, and Kent didn’t smell all that much better himself. But at least they’d brought Karim a stolen Threadmore and he no longer had to wrap a Cheyenne pelt around his body.
At the biomass site, they dug more dirt loose from around the pole, this time aided by more than their hands. Kueilan set up the equipment. In less than twenty minutes she had a display vibrating with a complex but steady pattern of waves crosshatched with jagged lines.
Jon said, “That’s baseline metabolic activity in the biomass, as translated into vibrations in the pole.”
Karim said, “How far down did you say that thing is?”
“Point-three-five-seven miles for the main mass. Although it has extensions coming up higher. Remember, Karim, it could be an amazingly complex organism by now. Biofilms diversify, creating all sorts of internal structures and communication networks, all malleable as needed. The mass might even incorporate non-microbial elements like alga-analogues. It might help you to conceptualize it as a city rather than a single individual.”
It would help most, Karim thought, for him to conceptualize it as Beta Vine, that long-dead helper of humanity. But the mass far under his feet wasn’t Beta
Vine, or any Vine. It was a vast unknown slime with which he was supposed to communicate.
“All right,” he said to Kueilan, seated cross-legged on the bare ground before her controls, “last time we communicated, we sent electron-shell numbers for iron. Try those again.”
Kueilan did. Almost immediately the display pattern altered to … something else. Karim squinted at it in the bright morning sunlight. Some fuzzy patches, some wavy fines, some irregular blobs …
“What’s that?” Kueilan asked.
Jon said, “I don’t know. It’s something, I guess, in that it’s different from what we had before, but I don’t know what.”
Karim said, “Try the shell pattern for sulfur. Last time the mass echoed that back to us.”
Kueilan keyed it in. The incomprehensible display pattern changed to a different incomprehensible display pattern.
Karim smacked his hand into his fist in frustration. “There’s no common starting point for interpretation!” He caught the skeptical look exchanged between Jon and Kent and remembered Jon’s earlier words days ago, a lifetime ago: ”I hate to say this, Karim, but no Terran or Greenie anaerobic microbes ever evolved to become so much as a multicellular organism, let alone sentient.”
They were wrong. They hadn’t seen the open biomass on the Vine planet, hadn’t communicated with it, had never been off Greentrees. They just were wrong. This thing a third of a mile down was sentient, and Karim was going to find a way not only to prove that but also to wrestle the biomass into helping them defeat the Furs.
He said to Kueilan, “Send a picture, not numbers. What’s stored in that system’s deebees? Have you got a schematic of, say, a molecule of adenine?”
“Yes, there’s a complete bio deebee,” she said.
“Send that.”
She did, and another incomprehensible visual came back.
Karim wasn’t deterred. “Send a schematic for guanine.”
Slowly he built up an informational picture of DNA, moving from the base proteins to the sugar-phosphate spines to the limits of his biological knowledge. DNA defined Furs as well as humans, of course. He was pondering how to proceed when Kueilan’s display suddenly changed radically. The formless visuals were replaced by the clear drawing of a Fur, complete with bared murderous teeth.
“Oh my God!” Jon said.
Karim said rapidly, “That’s the only DNA the biomass knows— so it was planted here before Vines knew there was such a thing as humans on Greentrees. It thinks we’re Furs sending to it! Quick, send an image of a human before—”
The Fur on the display began to dance.
There was no other word for it. The savage, startlingly accurate drawing hopped and gyrated, moving more and more wildly until it was looping and bending in ways no actual Fur ever could. Then its head came off and danced separately, rejoined the body, gave way to separated dancing legs. The four humans stared, jaws gaping. Finally the Fur disappeared, replaced by tall thin trees dancing equally wildly. The trees disappeared. The screen filled with wavy lines undulating at manic speed. Then nothing at all.
Jon breathed, “What the hell was that!”
Kueilan said, “Now there isn’t even basic metabolic patterns.”
“You know,” Kent said slowly, “if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that last frenetic screen was the equivalent of laughter.”
Karim said nothing. He felt stunned. Like Kent, he’d had the strong, irrational impression that the biomass simply was not taking their communication seriously. Not even when it thought the communicator was a Fur, its deadly and sworn enemy. What could hat mean?
Jon said, with only a tiny touch of malice, “What now, Karim?”
But Karim had no idea what they should do now.
29
BUNKER THREE
Alex, Natalie, Ben, and Lucy worked feverishly to reassemble the rover. They’d been able to fit only one dismantled rover in the bunker. The other, the one Lucy and Jake had arrived in, had been vaporized when the Fur ship passed overhead. Since Julian had deslaved her monitors from his, Alex received no reports from the orbital probes or comsats. She could send on her comlink, but without a link to the comsats she had very limited range. She couldn’t even receive reports. She was electronically blind.
It was the first time in her life that she had not been comlinked to much of the inhabited planet.
Julian knew where she was. He had weapons aboard the Crucible that, unlike the Fur beam from orbit, would destroy Bunker Three. Bombs, alpha beams. He also had the Greentrees skimmer, hidden far from Mira but under his control, along with his Terrans. He wouldn’t fly the skimmer while the Fur ship was creating its paths of total destruction: too great a risk of losing it. But after that… “He can’t let you live, Alex,” Jake said.
“I know. Nor you. Without us, he could deny my broadcast, say I’d been duped, he’s so good at persuasion, he…” She’d had to turn away from Jake. But it had been only a momentary faltering, and she didn’t allow herself another.
The rover seated four, and they were five. A young tech, an even younger and untried “soldier,” a feeble old man, a woman who’d been off-planet for fifty years, and Alex herself, a middle-aged woman who’d lost the city she was supposed to protect. With this army, she was supposed to take on a technologically advanced species and a pitiless megalomaniac.
You worked with what you had. That was the essence of being a tray-o.
“Ben, bring that thing over there … no, not that one, the brown thing,” Natalie said. She was the only one who was good with machinery. Ben supplied the muscle. Watching the girl work, her short dirty curls springing from her head in hectic spirals, Alex tried to plan, to maximize their resources, human and mechanical.
So much depended on so little.
They traveled by night, in electronic silence, through a landscape more empty than Alex could have imagined. She was almost glad she could see so little. In the dark, she could imagine there were still trees out there. Trees, bushes, the whole complex web of life, instead of nothingness.
Ben drove, pushing the rover as fast as it would go, Alex silent beside him. Natalie, Lucy, and Jake squeezed in the back. When Alex glanced back, she glimpsed Jake asleep with his head thrown back against the seat, drool at the corners of his mouth, Lucy’s arms around him either in protection or to keep herself from t
oppling into Natalie.
Lucy and Jake had been lovers fifty years ago, when they were thirty-nine years closer to being the same age. Alex tried to wrap her mind around both the relativistic and emotional facts. What did Lucy feel now, cradling Jake’s old and fragile body in her still strong, still young arms?
Alex pushed the question away. She couldn’t afford the distraction. All her energy was needed to plan. Not even thoughts of Julian could be allowed to intrude, except as an enemy to defeat.
Oh, Julian …
No.
The first thing they needed was a safe hideout. Julian knew where Bunker Three was. As soon as he was sure the Fur shuttle had left the area, he would send the skimmer to destroy the bunker. He might even use the Crucible to fire an alpha beam from a low orbit, but Alex doubted it. The Fur mother ship was up there somewhere, and Julian would try to keep the Crucible shielded from her by the planet. No, he would send the skimmer to destroy Bunker Three. But Alex would be gone.
To where?
The countryside around them, what she could see through one of the two night-vision helmets that had been aboard the rover, was completely denuded. No plants, no animals, nothing. Ben had been driving for nearly two hours at top speed, and they were still in the Furs’ kill-clean zone.
Under Ben’s thin helmet, clear except where the powerful vision strip crossed his eyes, tears dripped slowly.
Oh God. She couldn’t cope with his falling apart. What did she really know about this boy? He was a good enough tech to serve as backup for Natalie. But he also was—had been—a corporal in Julian’s army and Julian had trusted him enough to post him in Bunker Three under the dead captain Lewis … Sudden cold trickled along Alex’s spine. Could she trust Ben?
Yes. The boy had had the sense to sort through what Lucy and Jake said— well, what Jake had said, anyway. “Mr. Holman” had enormous prestige among Ben’s generation. Ben had believed Jake and had acted on his belief by helping Alex. Ben had recognized the truth about Julian much more quickly and objectively than had Alex. Maybe she should ask herself whether Ben could trust her.
He said, “Look over there, Alex, ninety degrees east.”
It was a frabbit, hopping frantically across the blank landscape.
“We must be coming to the end of the kill-clean zone,” Ben added, and a moment later she glimpsed, in zoom and infrared, the first tall treetops above the horizon.
When they entered the woods, Ben glanced over at her. From the backseat Lucy said, “We need a cave or something, Alex. To mask our thermal signature.”
“We’re a hundred miles from Mira“—where Mira was, you mean, don’t think of that now—“and the topography that close has been pretty well mapped. Julian has access to those deebees. He’ll know where all the caves are. A cave won’t work.”
“Neither will being out in the open like this,” Lucy said. A shrill undertone, born of tension and exhaustion, shot through her voice.
“I know that,” Alex said, holding her own voice even. The effort steadied her.
Natalie said, “I know this area a little. My study group used to camp near here. If you turn north, you’ll hit a large creek, a tributary of Mira’s river. It’s pretty wild here, with canyons and caves and overhangs. If we got down to the water, under a big enough overhang, our thermal signature won’t be detected.”
Lucy said, “What about the rover?”
Natalie said reluctantly, “We’d have to leave it topside. Cover it with a lot of branches. That’s probably the best we can do.”
“Turn north,” Alex said.
They found the creek, and the rest was backbreaking, filthy work, barely finished before dawn. By weak powertorch they slid down steep banks, rattling loose rocks to the creekbed. Alex was grateful for her Threadmores; the durable fabric protected her from cuts although not from bruises. At the bottom they waded and stumbled along the edge of the rapids, afraid every minute of being carried away, until they found one of Natalie’s overhangs. It wasn’t ideal: not as deep as Alex would have liked, nor as dry. But time was running out. It would have to do.
Next came the aching drudgery of carrying down the equipment and supplies, hiding the rover, trying to cover as much as possible the signs of their slipping, bruising descents. Ben carried Jake, both of them white with fear and pain. When they finally finished, every part of Alex hurt. She was so tired she barely had strength to spread a blanket, in the driest place she could find, for Jake to lie on. The old man looked up at her with piteous, rheumy eyes.
“I’m so damn useless.”
“No, you’re not,” she told him, her own eyes blurry from exhaustion. “You’re our mastermind.”
He snorted, and the next second he was asleep.
She spread her allotted blanket beside him, but Lucy appeared squatting beside her in the gloom.
“Alex, I need to comlink Karim.”
“Comlink! Good God, Lucy, you know we can’t do that! Julian will pick up every single electronic peep!”
“I know. But listen to me. Karim and Jon McBain are still by the biomass I told you and Jake about. Kueilan and Kent—those are two of Jon’s people—were going to get a computer and bring it to the site so Karim could open communications with the mass. When he succeeds, I know what Karim will do. He’ll go straight to Julian Martin to tell him about it. That can’t happen—you can’t give Julian Martin access to, or even any knowledge of, our only weapon! We must warn Karim!”
Alex peered at Lucy. All she saw was a dark blur. Alex could barely summon the energy to reply, and she had no energy for tact
“Lucy, that’s all crazy. Lunatic. You don’t even know what Jon’s biomass is, much less that it’s any kind of weapon, much less… it’s just crazy. You can’t open a comlink to Karim. Jon’s people wouldn’t have crossed the kill zone with any computer—how? In what? Nobody would loan a research biologist’s assistants a rover or computer at a time like this. Think. Karim can’t reach Julian anyway…
Julian’s bunker is hundreds of miles from the Avery Mountains. Even if Karim and Jon are still alive, which I doubt—” She stopped herself, aware of the cruelty in her words.
“They’re alive,” Lucy said steadily. “I know.”
“How?”
“I’d know if Karim were dead. I’d just know.”
Alex heard the romantic fervor in Lucy’s voice, the mystical lunacy, and the last of her patience snapped.
“Forget it, Lucy. I have no resources to spare for stupid reasoning or love-blinded daring. Go to sleep.”
Instantly the small dark shape vanished. Falling asleep, Alex’s last clear thought was, I wonder if she was always that unstable. Jake would know.
Hours later, when she awoke to bright harsh afternoon and the singing of the creek, Alex wished she had asked him. Natalie, Ben, and Jake still slept. Lucy Lasky was gone.
“The rover’s still there,” Ben said, clambering down the steep muddy bank. A shower of stones accompanied him. To Alex, Ben looked amazingly rested and energetic. Youth.
Natalie said, “So she walked? To where? What was she trying to do?”
Warn Karim, Alex thought but didn’t say aloud. But not even a reckless Lucy Lasky could expect to walk several hundred miles through a denuded kill-clean zone without being detected, or could expect to reach Karim quickly enough to stop him from contacting Julian. If Karim were even alive. So where had Lucy gone? What was her plan?
Natalie said suddenly, “Oh …” She ducked into the deepest recesses of their pathetic hideout and rummaged among the equipment from off the rover. That woke Jake, who called querulously, “Alex? Alex?”
Alex went to him. “Just a minute, Jake, we’ve got a problem … Natalie?”
“She took the flare,” Natalie said. “It’s gone.”
So that was it. The flare was microwave. It fired high into the sky and transmitted a distress message to the closest orbital comsat, which in turn routed it to its destination. If the user was incapable of rec
ording either message or destination coordinates, the flare would automatically send an SOS to the Mausoleum on priority-one override. Except, of course, the Mausoleum no longer existed.
“Who took a flare?” Jake was demanding in his cracked, early-morning voice. “Who? Who?”
“Lucy,” Alex said, to shut him up. “Natalie, how did Lucy even know what a flare was or how to work it? They didn’t have them when she was on Greentrees! Chu Corporation only put them on the market two years ago!”
Chu Corporation. Which no longer existed, either.
Natalie said guiltily, “I showed her. I’m sorry, we were going over all the equipment.”
“Lucy?” Jake croaked. “What did Lucy do? Alex? Alex?”
Alex explained to him. To her surprise, Jake didn’t dismiss Lucy’s ideas as deeply crazy.
“A biomass belonging to the Vines,” he said thoughtfully. “If that’s true … and if Lucy and Karim saw it on the Vine planet…”
He must have caught a glimpse of Alex’s face.
“Alex, you weren’t there. You never met Beta Vine, you never saw the inside of a Vine ship, you never experienced how different they are, how completely strange … and Karim is genuinely intelligent. If he can—”
“Can what?” site said acidly. “Can get a mess of bacteria buried miles in the ground to attack a starship? Jake, just because it’s Lucy Lasky—”
“Listen!” Ben said abruptiy. “Oh God, listen!”
Julian’s voice, muted by the creek roar, filtered into the depression under the overhang.
It came from the comlink, set to receive continuously. Natalie had carefully propped it on a rock out in the open but safe from the creek. The link had been left on continuous receive. Julian was making an all-channel speech.
“—tragic loss that should only make those of us left determined to fight on all that harder. Alex Cutler embodied all that is best in Greentrees: courage, generosity, and, most of all, love for this beautiful planet. You know that I was not born here. But I share Alex’s love for Greentrees; I share her commitment to its survival; I share her conviction, absolute to the bottom of her soul, that humanity will survive on this planet.
