Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  She started toward Jake, some stupid idea half-formed in her mind of protecting him with her body as long as possible. She never reached him. She stumbled and fell hard on her face, and then something powerful and fetid lifted her off her feet from behind and ran with her, but only a short distance. A pit yawned at her feet. She was thrown into it, landing on top of flesh that she didn’t identify until more flesh was thrown on top of her. Alex felled and tried to get up, but different arms seized her and Karim’s voice said in her ear. “Lie still! The cover is fragile!”

  A dark cover slid over the pit. Dirt rained down onto Alex’s face, into her eyes and mouth. She spat it out, willing herself to not struggle. There was no room. The cover was fragile.

  She had seen, just before it closed and darkened the pit completely, that the cover was made of crossed wooden beams, not substantial, covered with branches, which in turn were smothered vith mud and rocks. Everything, she realized numbly, must have been hauled in last night from beyond the kill-clean zone. The dirt from the excavated pit must have been spread around the area to look natural. “Pits,” plural—there were no wild Furs in this one.

  The aliens had dug two, one to shelter their improvident human allies too stupid to think of this themselves.

  The shuttle annihilation beam stopped at the ground’s surface.

  She said hoarsely, “Karim? Jon? Kent?”

  “Yes,” they answered. “And Ben. But they knocked him out.”

  “Jake?”

  “No,” Karim said, adding, “they kept him with them. In the other pit.” Alex breathed again.

  “I think,” Jon said, “he’s the only one they’re interested in. Did you see the Vine, all of you? It shrank as soon as the shuttle was spotted! No, not shrank, it sort of dissolved and the residue sank into the ground… I’ll bet it can just grow again after the danger is past!”

  All of them in the ground, Vine and wild Furs and people, burrowing like animals to hide from the awesome technology of the invaders. And Jake, kept by the wild Furs with them, in case the unknowable humans suddenly erupted from their safe pit and stupidly killed themselves. The primitives had been protecting Jake from his own kind.

  Which was horrifying because Alex, bile rising in her throat, suddenly knew what Jake had been drawing on the ground. Why Karim had shuddered. What Jake was planning to do to his protectors.

  And she couldn’t see any other course except to go along with him.

  35

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  Dirt in his mouth, in his eyes. His heart, alarmed by the lack of air, began to hammer and skip so much that Jake thought, This is it. I’m going to die.

  A picture came to him, unbidden and incongruous: himself and his brother, Donnie, small children safe in his mother’s arms. The picture was ridiculous; Jake had been half-grown when Donnie was born. But the picture had a force, an authority, that transended fact. Soft light suffused it, and peace, and such sweetness that Jake almost felt a stab of disappointment when his heartbeat slowed and evened.

  He wasn’t going to die, after all. Not yet.

  And he wasn’t in his mother’s arms—he was in a makeshift pit with a bunch of fetid, furry, murderous aliens, hiding from the lethal wapons of another bunch of fetid, furry, even more murderous aliens.

  Light filtered into his dirt-blurred eyes and he realized that the aliens were opening the pit, were climbing out. Hairy arms with shockingly wet tentacles on the ends lifted him, not ungently, and set him on the ground. His chair was gone, annihilated. The computer was gone. The rover was gone.

  “Jake!” Alex said, kneeling beside him. “Are you all right?”

  Suddenly too weak to sit, he slumped over. Alex’s strong young arms eased him to a lying position.

  “I’m…fine.”

  “’They’re gone,” she said, and he wasn’t sure wheater she meant the space Furs or the wildFurs until he glimpsed the later standing impassive several yards upwind. Jake closed his eyes.

  Someone said, “Ben’s coming to,” and Alex vanished.

  She returned with water and food. Jake allowed her to help him up, sip and nibble. He needed every bit of strength he could muster.

  Karim knelt beside Jake. He said excitedly, “It’s growing again, Jake. The Vine.”

  He nodded. He’d expected this. The death flowers, as William Shipley had conjectured so long ago, were packets of information. Nlot just genomes, either. The Vines and their biofilms, in some symbiosis so alien that it couldn’t really be defined in human terms, preserved information in atomic or molecular structure. All information. If Shipley and Jake were right, the vast underground biomass had used the death flowers to create a Vine that knew everything known to the Vines on that long-ago ship.

  Those Vines had known a much younger Jake. Had known Karim and Lucy and the dead Dr. Shipley. Had known about Greentrees and the Vine-created biological experiments there, the wild Furs. Had known about the humans’ capture by space Furs. Had participated in the Vine plot, centuries in the making and probably successful, to win the war against their ancient enemy.

  The Vines on that ship had created and infected the humans, the inadvertent intermediate species, with a genetically tailored virus. The virus made the humans very sick; the elderly William Shipley had nearly died. Then the virus jumped species to the DNA-based Furs. There it didn’t sicken in the same way. Instead, it lodged in the Furs’ brain and rendered them so passive they operated on only a survival level. It also made them sexually irresistible to each other— which guaranteed maximum spread of the disease. Infected Furs would breed, and minimally care for their young. They would not invent, travel, or wage war.

  They would instead sit dreaming in the sun, as close to plants as their plantlike enemy could make them. Passive, impotent, tamed.

  It was that death-in-life that the space Furs had fled to Greentrees to escape.

  This newly growing Vine on Greentrees, product of information stored in the death flowers, already knew all that. It knew how to create the virus as the Vines on the ship had done, as a drinkable fluid that could use humans as intermediate host.

  Beyond the lone Vine, Jake could see the wild Furs, standing with their spear butts on the ground and their contraband laser guns again in their other hands. Their river camp, merely a few miles away, included females, which the space Furs, if they had the chance, would abduct to their ship upstairs.

  Karim rose. “I’m going over to the Vine, Jake. Although how we’re going to communicate with it without the computer is—Alex will come to you in a minute. She’s tending Ben, he has a nasty hit on the head. The Vine is about a foot tall now, can you see it? I’ll turn you—”

  “No,” Jake said. “Don’t.”

  Karim stopped, puzzled. Then, drawn by the drama of alien growth, he moved away. Jake could hear Jon McBain babbling in the background.

  Then Alex knelt again beside him, holding out more water. After he’d drunk, she brought her face level with his. Her black-lashed gray eyes gazed steadily.

  She’d guessed what was going to happen.

  “You can’t, Jake.”

  “I’m not… going to,” he wheezed. “Vine is.”

  “You’ve told me the story over and over,” Alex said. “Somebody, some human, has to drink it and get infected, then breathe on the wild Furs. You’re the only one they’ll let get close. And you’re not strong enough this time around. Do you hear me? Last time you were in your forties, not your eighties! And anyway these Furs just saved all of our lives!”

  “Do you have a better plan?”

  She was silent.

  He said feebly, “The wild Furs won’t die.”

  “They might as well. And you will die.”

  “It’s my time, Alex.”

  “Not yet!” she cried loudly, anguished enough that Kueilan, bent over Ben, looked up in fright. Alex dropped her voice. “It’s not right, Jake.”

  He wasn’t sure whether she meant his dying or his infecting
the wild Furs, and he didn’t want to waste precious energy asking. “The Vine will form a… bowl. Bring it to me.”

  “No,” Alex said. And then, “Oh, Jake!”

  “Have to.” He closed his eyes.

  Time passed, he wasn’t sure how much. Surely he wouldn’t fall asleep under these circumstances! And yet, he must have. When he opened his eyes again, it was because someone was lifting him, and somehow it was nearly dark.

  “What… how…”

  “Shhh, Jake, be quiet.” Lucy… how could Lucy be here? They’d left her at the river camp! But in the gloom he could just make out her small, furrowed face as she stood beside him. Kent held him, walking toward the rover.

  Jake pulled his head just high enough to glance above Kent’s shoulder. The plain was empty—no Furs, no Vine, no computer. “Alex!”

  “Back at camp already. You were asleep.”

  He said angrily, “I was drugged!” Alex holding out the cup of water, her gray eyes pained with her accurate guesses. Kueilan, with a medpack to bandage Alex’s too-small hands, to tend to Ben’s head. Medpacks included sedatives.

  Lucy said, “She loves you like a daughter.”

  “She’s the tray-o! She isn’t supposed to love anyone enough to wreck war plans!”

  Lucy said calmly, “Yes. You never did.”

  Kent lifted Jake into the backseat of the rover. Lucy and Kent climbed in front, driving. When the rover pulled away, all that was left on the bare plain were two shallow empty pits.

  Alex sat a little apart from the others around the campfire, waiting. It wasn’t much of a fire, a small faltering flame built on a large flat rock just beyond the overhang. Kent fed it steadily with small twigs. Whenever the wind shifted, smoke blew into their shallow protected cave, but there wasn’t enough of it to cause anyone distress. Lucy had built the fire from some need of her own, and no one had objected.

  A similar fire burned across and a quarter mile up the river, where the Furs did whatever it was Furs did in the evening.

  Abruptly Alex said, “I’m going now.” Kueilan stood and Alex added irritably, “Alone.”

  “Just partway,” Kueilan said in her pretty, soothing voice.

  “No.” This was her mission.

  Alex picked up the powertorch, switched it on low, and started to ford the river. It was low, partly due to the lack of rain. Still, as the water rose from her knees to thighs to waist, she felt a moment of panic. This was a mountain river—she could imagine a sudden rushing current knocking her off her feet. A strong hand gripped her elbow.

  “Damn it, I said alone!”

  “Too bad,” Karim’s voice said. “I’m here.”

  But once they’d reached the opposite bank, he let her go on alone. No males, she knew. Human males were definitely threatening to the wild Furs. The hope was that females were merely distasteful.

  Alex shivered. From being clammy and soaked in the evening air? She hoped not. It had seemed to her around the fire that she’d felt the onset of symptoms and hence—she hoped—of contagion.

  She walked along the opposite side of the river, picking her way among the wet stones. The eroded bank rose beside her, now steep and now failing into a low mass of rubble. The Greentrees nightsmell, sweet and poignant, competed with the dank stones and exposed soil. Once Alex stumbled and fell, and when she picked herself up again, her vision swam and sweat sprang out on her face and neck.

  The Vines knew their molecular pathological business.

  I approve, Alex thought, lurching again. The Vines were all a sort of tray-o, if you looked at it correctly. Using the resources they knew best, genetic manipulation. Just as she used technology and Julian used—

  Don’t think of Julian. One enemy at a time.

  How close would the wild Furs let her get?

  She couldn’t see them anymore. Either they’d doused their fire at her approach or her vision was really going. Everything looked oddly green, not the normal purple it should be. But of course it was night, you couldn’t see Greentrees’ healthy purple at night, all you could see was dark until Julian arrived, he usually arrived deep into the night, slipping into bed beside her—

  She fell into three inches of moving water and could not get up.

  Julian—

  But she wasn’t close enough! She had to breathe on the Furs, she had to stumble into their camp and hope they didn’t spear her before she could infect them, or maybe laser her with Julian’s guns … Julian …

  Alex tried to get up, failed. She closed her eyes. The river noise grew louder, became a roar, then a shrieking cacophony. It hurt. Alex cried out and flailed, trying to cover her ears. Somehow she couldn’t manage it. But there was something else she was supposed to do, something important, something for Julian—

  For Julian—

  Karim’s arms lifted her again. It hurt worse than lying on the wet stones and again she cried out. Damn Karim! But it wasn’t Karim. The arms were furry and there was an odd smell, and there was something she was supposed to do for Julian—

  Yes. Now she remembered.

  Alex turned her face toward the face of the Fur carrying her, and breathed.

  36

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  Karim watched Alex stagger along the riverbed until he couldn’t stand it any longer and had to turn away. It should have been him. He had argued that it should be him. But Alex, with Jake drugged, had simply ordered otherwise. She was the leader on Greentrees, in the absence of someone called Ashraf Shanti, whom Karim had never heard of. And Shanti was unavailable: out of com, missing, possibly dead. The scientist in him knew it had to be a woman; the man rebelled.

  “I’m doing it,” Alex said, and Lucy had nodded. Lucy! Why? Karim expected Lucy to side with him, and she had not, and before long he was going to find out why. No matter what personal quarrel it injected in the middle of a war.

  Alex fell, lurched slowly upward. Karim clenched his fists. Above the bank he heard the rover return with Jake, roaring along fast… too fast. Kent had stayed with Jake when the first group returned to the bank—too many for one trip, Alex had argued, especially with Ben injured. But Karim suspected that she simply wanted Jake away until the disease had begun to affect her and she had started along the river to the wild Furs. Lucy had driven back to pick up Jake and Kent. But why was the rover coming in so fast?

  “Get in!” Lucy screamed over the edge of the riverbank. “They’re coming! They know where we are!” Who?

  “Julian Martin! Get in, get in, damn it! They’re not coming from air, they’ve got rovers, they have these coordinates. Get in, everybody!”

  Karim scrambled up the bank. His mind raced. If Lucy was right, rovers couldn’t trace them if they kept comlink silence, but they could follow the physical tracks …

  Kueilan said, “How do you know?”

  “Open comlink from somebody called Siddalee Brown … get in! Get in!”

  Who was Siddalee Brown? Whoever she was, she would be dead now if she’d sent an open comlink to Alex Cutler warning her that Julian Martin was on his way to her … How had this Brown person known that Alex wasn’t already dead, as Martin had claimed? None of it made sense.

  Kent sat in the backseat, holding Jake’s frail body, leaving as much room as possible. But in a four-person vehicle they were eight, without Alex…

  Without Alex.

  “We can’t leave Alex!” Kueilan cried, his own cry, but Karim already knew better. If they stayed, and Julian Martin was really on the way, they had no time to wait for Alex, who was probably better off than they were anyway. Julian might not look for her among wild Furs.

  “They’ll probably just return me to you,” Alex had argued, before she’d stopped discussing and simply issued orders. “A female is a piece of lost property.”

  But no one really knew.

  People scrambled into the rover. Natalie, to Karim’s surprise, confronted Lucy. “I can drive along the river—Ben showed me the places to go. It’ll cover th
e tracks.”

  Lucy said, “No, I’m—”

  Natalie, twenty pounds heavier, simply shoved Lucy aside and took the wheel. Angry tears shone on Natalie’s cheeks. A small detached part of Karim’s mind registered this, as well as Natalie’s tender glance over her shoulder at the injured

  Ben, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, being cradled on Jon’s lap much as Jake was on Kent’s. Kueilan squeezed between them, half kneeling on the floor. Karim scrambled in beside Lucy in the front, the two of them squashed together on one seat, and Natalie took off down the riverbank into the shallows.

  It was a ride so wild that later Karim would wonder how Jake and Ben survived it. But their two nurses cushioned them with Kent’s and Jon’s own bodies. Jon had the worst of it; Ben outweighed him by at least forty pounds.

  Natalie drove expertly; she was a natural. The rover hurtled along in the gloom away from the wild Furs, toward the place Ben must have used to hide the rover. Wherever it was, Karim never saw it. When the last of daylight faded, Natalie switched on the rover’s lights but kept them pointed downward, toward the river. They drove over rocks, through pools, through shallow rapids, keeping deep enough so that there would be no tracks. Water sloshed into the rover, then flooded its floor. Could the vehicle keep going this soaked? Evidently it could. Natalie had said there wasn’t much left of the last fuel cell. What if it ran out?

  “Jake?” Karim yelled once to Kent over the noise of the rover, the river, and Natalie’s cursing.

  “I don’t know,” Kent yelled back.

  “I’m … fine,” Jake said, and Karim thought again that whatever else Jake was, he was the bravest man Karim had ever known. Including himself.

  I should not have let Alex…

  “I’m going up,” Natalie called, and Karim saw that the river had taken them out of the kill-clean zone. Tall tranquil purple trees bordered the banks, silhouetted faintly against the starlight. The rover wrenched itself and then drove, it seemed to Karim, straight upward. Surely it would tip … It didn’t, and they were out. Natalie drove a while longer, then headed into a thick grove of trees and cut the engine.