by Nancy Kress
Austin burst into tears. Immediately he hated himself for it, and then a moment later he didn’t because Claire’s face softened and she put her arms around him.
“Oh, Austin, it isn’t always like that, and maybe especially not on Kindred where you have such different social systems from Leningrad or Cawnpore or … Rome! Why did Tony tell you all that? It wasn’t fair, you’re just a kid. Austin, listen to—”
“I’m not a kid!” And to prove it, he kissed her hard on the mouth and put a hand on her breast. She came up only to his shoulder and her bones felt light as a leelee’s, so he was surprised at the strength with which she pushed him away. Comfort and sympathy were gone from her face as she stalked back to the main cave.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Austin—grow up!”
* * *
Dawn brought more rain. Leo came off perimeter patrol around a quiet and nearly empty camp and reported to Owen, who was coming on duty. In the ready room, Leo took off his gear and stowed it in his lockbox, brushed his teeth, and glanced at the pallet he was not going to sleep on. At least, not yet, despite having had only four hours in the last twenty. Some things outranked sleep.
Isabelle waited in the kitchen. She’d made coffee, or what passed for coffee here. Leo searched for the word and found it: “Nakl.”
“Very good.”
“I didn’t know if you’d come, what with … with everything.”
“Teaching you is about the only good thing in my life right now.”
Leo’s heart threatened to burst right down its seam. Even if she only meant that the rest of her life was shitty—and that was what she meant, not that he was some shining star for her—it was still good. He sipped the nakl she handed him, even though he didn’t like it.
Isabelle smiled. There was something wrong with the smile, something a little off, but she didn’t give him time to figure out what it was. “Let’s see how much you remember from last time. Tell me how to close the door.”
He stumbled over the words but got them out.
“Good! Now tell me how to do it if I’m a mother.”
Shit—she was a mother, and that meant different words. Leo found them, his eyes on her face.
“Good! Great!” Big smile—too big. Something was definitely off.
They went through several more phrases of conversation, and then Isabelle moved closer to him. Leo, no neophyte with women, thought: Here it comes. He was a little surprised that Isabelle would try to pull this, but then, the circumstances weren’t the same as some college girl slumming in an on-base bar. He knew what she would ask.
She did.
“Leo,” she said, taking his hand, “I need you to help me.”
“Yeah?”
She kissed him. The press of her lips, soft and full on his, was so intoxicating that for a minute the kitchen, the compound, the planet were blotted out.
“I need you to go after Kayla and Austin for me, because no one else will.”
Gently he pushed her away. “I can’t, Isabelle. You shouldn’t even ask me, and you know that. This isn’t like you. Lamont will go after them when he can, maybe today.”
“No, he won’t.” She was Isabelle again, straightforward and steely. He liked her better this way, although he understood why she’d tried to fuck him over. Family. Bu^ka^tel.
“Listen to me, Leo. Lamont isn’t thinking straight. He’s getting paranoid. Salah says he’s on some drug—popbite.”
“He is.”
“You knew?”
“Fuck, Isabelle, we all use it when we have to. Maybe it didn’t exist when you left Terra, but in the last decade … We all use it if we have to.” He pushed away the memory of Brazil. “But listen, Austin and your sister are okay. Even Dr. Patel will be. So what if they ride out the spore cloud in some crazy survivalist bunker? Do you really think that those two Terrans will harm them? Tony and what’s-his-name?”
“Who knows what they’ll do!”
“The truth, Isabelle. Do you think they’ll harm Austin or Kayla?”
Long silence. Then she said, “No.”
“Then it can wait. After the cloud hits and we see what we’re up against with survivors and vaccinated kids and all, then we can go convince Austin to come out. Or maybe they’ll just leave the cave voluntarily. Why are they in there in the first place? They’ll all be immune to spore disease.”
“Probably, yes. But any Kindred they have with them won’t be. If they have some survivalist idea of restarting civilization, they’ll have women with them. Claire Patel is too old.”
“So how—”
Isabelle said, “Austin’s friend Graa^lok has sisters. Young, pretty…”
“Well, there you go. And Austin’s not a stupid kid. He makes himself useful, and he keeps an eye on what’s around him. Sure, he’s a little wet behind the ears, but he’s sharp. He got his mother out there by fooling us all, didn’t he? Dr. Patel, too. Those guys will want Austin around. He even finds them new stuff that might be useful, like that alien junk he told me about buried in the sand, and he can also translate anything that—”
Isabelle took a step backward. “What did you just say?”
Leo blinked. “I said Austin can translate any—”
“Before that!”
He had to make an effort to remember. “Austin told me he found some old piece of junk buried in the sand way back in a cave and … let me think … yeah, he said it was alien and wasn’t rusty. At all. Isabelle—what is it?”
Her face had gone bone white. Was she going to faint? Leo reached out to grab her, but Isabelle was made of tougher stuff than that. She held onto a kitchen shelf and breathed deep. Then she said, “Go get Lieutenant Lamont.”
“Whoa, you don’t want to—”
“Do it. I’ll get Marianne and the others. Tell Lamont it’s urgent. Life-or-death urgent. No, tell him something else, something he’ll want to hear.
“Tell him there might be a way to call a ship to take him home.”
* * *
Salah Bourgiba wasn’t convinced. Leo could see that. He thought the unrusty object that Austin had mentioned might be anything at all, a view that Leo shared, even though he didn’t like sharing anything with Bourgiba. Dr. Jenner and Isabelle believed it was the call-back device but that, Leo thought, was because they wanted to believe it. Branch wanted mostly to get his hands on the hardware.
It was Owen who disturbed Leo.
He’d gone outside to look for Owen but found him instead in the ready room. Owen must have taken more popbite because he was hyperawake, counting his clips of ammo. They lay on the floor in lines straight as a parade drill, but Owen nudged one of them a fraction of an inch to the right. What was the point of that? Better not to ask.
“Sir, sorry to distur—”
“What?” Owen’s calm, following so much irritability in the past week, was more unsettling than a shout or howl. The whites of his eyes looked yellowish, and the pupils were enormous. Not yet in armor, his weight loss was obvious. How much popbite was he doing? Every soldier knew the limits, as well as what could happen if you exceeded them.
Leo said, “Dr. Jenner and the others think they might have a way to call the colony ship back from wherever it is and use it to go back to Terra.”
Owen went completely still. Seconds passed, during which Owen stared hard at something in the corner of the room. Leo turned his head, but the corner was empty.
Finally Owen said, “How?”
“Some device that Austin Rhinehart found in the mountains. He said to … they would like to discuss this with you, sir. In the clinic.”
Owen put his ammo into his lockbox, locked it, and strode out. Since he had no orders to the contrary, Leo followed.
The Terrans had moved into the leelee lab, leaving the door open to let out some of the stink. Noah wasn’t there. The leelees chittered—didn’t the dumb things ever sleep? Well, if not, they looked better not sleeping than Owen, who reminded Leo of a twitchy jaguar he’d seen in
Brazil.
“Lieutenant Lamont,” Isabelle said. “We have two pieces of information for you. First, a few days ago Austin told Leo that he’d found an ‘unrusty alien piece of machinery’ in Tony Schrupp’s cave, where Austin took Dr. Patel. Before she died, the Mother of Mothers told me there had originally been a device to call back the colony ship, World’s other spaceship. It’s been sending signals, as you know. Branch decoded them with that”—Isabelle pointed at a pile of machinery taking up a good chunk of floor space next to a rumpled pallet—“and there is a good chance that if we can get the device from the cave and use it through Branch’s transmitter, we can call the colony ship back here.”
Owen said nothing. His yellowish, huge-pupiled eyes did not blink.
Marianne said, “If we can get the ship here, there might be a chance that Branch could change its destination settings to Terra. After all, other settings aboard the Friendship were reprogrammable. Within limits, yes, but—”
“Why should I believe you?” Owen said in a calm, reasonable voice that nonetheless made Leo’s skin prickle. “You want the hostages back. I said no. All of a sudden you come up with another reason for an extraction.”
Bourgiba’s eyes narrowed and he started to speak, but Isabelle put a hand on his arm. Smart Isabelle—she could do this better than anyone else.
Isabelle said, “I understand what you’re saying, Lieutenant. But Austin spoke originally to Corporal Brodie, and I’m sure you trust your own unit’s intel.”
“Brodie?” Owen said, without turning.
“It’s true, sir.” Leo strained to remember Austin’s exact words. “I caught him coming back to camp and he told me that Noah Jenner already knows where he goes, but that Jenner didn’t know everything, that Austin was the only one who knew everything. The kid said that Jenner didn’t know that Austin found ‘a rusty old alien machine buried in sand.’ He told me it’s shaped like a pyramid. He didn’t know what it was for.”
Isabelle said, “Ree^ka told me the call-back device was pyramidal. Also, it’s the only piece of alien machinery pictured in the tablets but never found. Geological activity over eons—”
Fuck geological activity. Leo saw that Owen had stopped listening. Owen stared at the floor, head down, an un-Owen-like pose. When he raised his head, his face looked somehow both twitchy and impassive.
“All right. We go after the call-back device.”
Don’t say thank you, Isabelle. This was a mission decision, not a favor or capitulation, don’t let him think it is …
Dr. Jenner said, “Thank—”
“What do you want us to do?” Isabelle said, quick and loud. “Do you need a translator?”
Of course he didn’t; the survivalists spoke English. But it was probably the first thing Isabelle had thought of.
“Wake Jenner,” Owen said. “He can guide us to the cave. If he’s too injured, then I need everything he knows about direction, distance, terrain, and the enemy forces inside the objective, including what weapons they might have. What is your second piece of information?”
This time, Isabelle let Dr. Jenner speak. “It’s what’s aboard the colony ship. Every time we’ve exposed leelees to spores here in the lab—”
“You have spores here? From Terra?”
Dr. Jenner looked surprised. “A limited number. What did you think we used to manufacture vaccines?”
Leo thought: Did I know they had live spores? No, he did not. The scientists had assumed everyone knew the science, and Owen had assumed their business was separate from his mission. Just as he’d tried to keep the squad separate and self-contained, using everything short of a nonfraternization order.
“Anyway,” Dr. Jenner continued, “all the lab leelees that we exposed to spores died. But Branch has auditory evidence that on the colony ship, there are live leelees. That argues that they’re somehow immune to the spores that killed the Kindred crew. It might be that just a few with natural genetic immunity survived and bred. But here on Kindred we haven’t found any leelees with natural immunity. The other possibility is a virophage, a virus that destroys the spores, and if we can get the ship here and let the virophages loose before the spore cloud hits, and if the virophage proves to be airborne, it might save any of the population that can breathe it in. It’s a long shot, but even so we—Lieutenant?”
Owen had turned away. No one saw his face except Leo, and he felt his own eyes widen. Owen’s face jerked into a rage that Leo had seen only once before: in Brazil, on a suicide bomber rushing toward a group of Marines.
The rage vanished. Owen turned back to the others. “Bring me Noah Jenner. We start at first light. I’ll take Specialist Berman with me. Private Kandiss and Corporal Brodie will remain here to secure the building.”
Bourgiba said angrily, “We no longer need ‘securing’ because there’s no more vaccine to—”
But Owen had already left the room.
* * *
Austin sat at a rough table with his mother and Claire, eating dinner. The cave was dim and cool. Claire had poked among the supplies and cooking pots and weird stove—Austin didn’t understand what powered it—and produced a soup far tastier than the dry and cold stuff Austin had had before. Beyon-mak ate three bowls of it before disappearing back to his stupid old equipment. Tony, who’d also eaten three bowls of soup, kept looking toward the tunnel door.
Claire ignored them all, talking only to Kayla. “Can I ask how many hours of sleep you usually get in a night?”
Kayla shook her head, but then she answered. “Maybe ten. But it’s not good sleep. I can’t get up in the morning.”
“What’s the most pleasurable thing in your life, if you don’t mind my asking? Your life at the lahk, I mean.”
“Nothing is pleasurable.”
There were more questions, gentle and kind—why didn’t Claire talk to him that way!—until Kayla finally said, “Enough. Sorry. I can’t.” Her eyes filled and she went back to her pallet behind the curtain.
“Austin,” Claire said, “your mother is seriously depressed. She has at least eight of the nine signs of clinical depression. Do you know if there are drugs for this on Kindred and what they’re called?”
“Isabelle says there aren’t.” At least she was talking to him.
“What happens to people who are psychotic or schizophrenic or severely bipolar?”
“I don’t know those words.”
“I mean, people who can’t function normally in society?”
“My mother’s normal! She just wants to go home! She doesn’t belong in a du¡hn!”
“Is that an asylum? Perhaps not. But I’m worried that—” The tunnel bell rang three times and Claire startled. “What’s that?”
Tony raced from a side tunnel to the door, unlocked it, and disappeared into the tunnel.
Austin said, “That’s Graa^lok’s signal. He’s back.”
Tony led seven women from the tunnel, followed by Graa^lok. Austin recognized Graa^lok’s mother and two sisters; he’d known them since he was three. The other girls, all young, were strangers. All wore cloaks and carried large packs.
“Oh my God,” Claire said. “You really think you can form a polygamous commune.”
Austin didn’t know what a “polygamous commune” was, but it didn’t sound good. Or maybe it did. Graa^lok’s mother smiled uncertainly and said in World, “I greet you, Tony-mak.”
“Tony-kal,” Graa^lok corrected. “We’re a new kind of lahk now.”
Another of the girls, the youngest, peered shyly at Austin. He stood up taller. She was even prettier than Claire.
Saving civilization might be great, after all.
CHAPTER 17
Leo stood on the roof, watching Owen and Zoe, both green in his night-vision goggles, as they set off north toward the mountains. The camp, its population a quarter of its former size, wasn’t yet stirring. Were the Kindred left here the ones with no lahk to go back to? But everyone had a lahk. Maybe the vaccinated children and their
parents were the hangers-on, the parents hoping to hand their kids over to the Terrans as the spore cloud hit and they themselves died.
But that horror would have to wait. Leo had another one to deal with.
Kandiss was on perimeter patrol. He would be back soon. Leo dropped from the roof and went inside the compound, where seven people slept. Plenty of room for them now.
In the ready room, he tried to smash the lock on Owen’s lockbox with the butt of his rifle. It didn’t give, and neither did the metal of the box itself. Okay, then—he’d have to blast it open, despite who might hear. Zoe was the explosives specialist, not him, but Zoe wasn’t here. Leo fitted the silencer, even though silencers never really were, onto his rifle and blew the lock.
Congrats, Leo—you just qualified yourself for court-martial.
Owen had taken all the weapons, the full monte. His lockbox held only a photograph of a beautiful girl—who? Leo had no idea—a plastic bottle, and a Kindred box made of the stuff that Isabelle called “bioplast.” Leo had almost forgotten what plastic felt like in his hand: smoother than bioplast, slipperier, somehow more slimy. The bottle held tabs of popbite. Leo knew what was in the bioplast before he opened it. But he’d had to look, had to be sure, had to prove himself wrong if he could.
God, he wished he’d been wrong.
He heard a sound behind him and turned. Isabelle stood there, dressed in some sort of flimsy nightie thing. She said, “I heard a noise and—Leo, what are you doing?”
“Nothing. Get out.”
She stepped into the room. Leo snapped shut the box, but she’d already seen. “Those are … oh my God, the vaccines. Did you … no. Lamont.”
He stood. “I said get out, Isabelle. Go back to bed.”
She ignored him. “He was the one who stole them. Lamont. When everything was so confused during that first assault—he was checking the compound before we all went back in even though it hadn’t been breached … but why? Why?”
