by Nancy Kress
Owen, it had turned out, had been one of them.
Five hundred yards away, people were hesitating, reversing direction to head back to the ship. Only a few, at first.
Then more.
* * *
Salah laid a hand on the arm of the first person he recognized, a gentle woman named Fallaabon. He had treated her rambunctious little son for a broken finger when the child had fallen from a tree near the refugee camp, one of the few occasions when the Kindred had not used their own doctors. Perhaps none had been handy. Salah spoke to Fallaabon as quickly and decisively as his Kindred would allow, explaining about the virophages, the leelees alive on the ship, the need to blast open the hull, the danger of taking her child too close to it. Others gathered to listen. Salah framed everything in terms of the children and of bu^ka^tel, at least to the extent he understood that enormously complicated concept. Obligation to her lahk, to the greater good, to the future, to the planet itself.
More people gathered to listen. Some nodded and began to move away from the ship.
Salah had lost track of Isabelle and of Leo’s cops; it was a big crowd. But less big than it had been. After half an hour, it seemed that they were making headway—people were leaving.
Then, somehow, the momentum reversed. Others were making speeches, too, Kindred with a different agenda. People still listened to Salah, but not as many, and some slid their eyes away from him and made a gesture that he had only seen associated with dung.
He saw Fallaabon lead her little boy back toward the ship.
* * *
The longer Leo hesitated, the more people had time to move themselves and their children close to the hull.
Leo had shot civilians before. Women, too, and even a kid. But they had all been credible threats to either his own platoon or to the Marines he’d been protecting. This was different. Nothing in his training or history or temperament prepared him for this.
If he fired the missile, it would—if it didn’t blow up—breach the side of the ship, letting loose Dr. Jenner’s virophage but also killing innocent men, women, kids.
If he didn’t shoot, the Kindred would take up their wrongheaded, determined position right up against the ship, convinced they were protecting themselves from plague, until four days passed, the spore cloud hit, and they all died of spore disease anyway. Or didn’t.
What if the virophage didn’t even work?
What if it did?
Kill maybe two dozen to save a planet?
He was not supposed to have to make this sort of decision. He was a sniper, and this sort of decision was supposed to be made farther up the chain of command so that Leo could obey orders. But there was no farther up this particular chain of command, and time was running out.
Leo sighted, adjusted for the freshening wind, squeezed the trigger, and fired.
The canister left the launcher without exploding. A moment later, the longest moment in history, it hit the hull of the ship broadside and tore a hole the size of a pickup. The blast shattered the air. Flying shrapnel, screaming, bodies falling to the ground.
Leo lowered his weapon and scanned the carnage, looking for Isabelle.
* * *
Salah felt it before it actually happened. How? No time to think, and the sensation was beyond thought, anyway. Brodie was going to fire. Salah knew it.
Fallaabon’s little boy turned and, still holding his mother’s hand, smiled and said something to Salah in Kindred. There was no time to answer. There was only time to act.
And to think, as he threw his body on the mother and child, This is my decision. Mine, by myself, for myself.
The ship exploded.
CHAPTER 21
Marianne woke to the sound of wind outside the compound. Not a religious person, nonetheless her first thought was a fervent Thank God! Which god? It didn’t matter. They needed wind.
There had been no wind the day the ship landed. No wind as they counted the dead and buried them. No wind as Isabelle, dry-eyed but clearly only by an effort of will, stumbled through a poem over Salah Bourgiba’s grave. Marianne didn’t know the poem and was surprised that Isabelle did, but Isabelle was endlessly surprising.
Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one
At the end of the path which I’ve only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp
At such great distance, so fully manifest—
And it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
Into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are.
It sounded like something Salah might have taught her. Had Isabelle loved Salah? Marianne didn’t think so, even though they had been sleeping together.
The Rangers had not attended Bourgiba’s burial. Mason Kandiss had watched it from his post on the roof. Leo Brodie had had the good sense, or decency, or something—categories were so confused here—to stay inside the compound. What Brodie had done made possible Kindred’s only hope of planetary survival. It had also killed twenty-four people, ten of them children.
Marianne wondered if, circumstances permitting, Brodie would ever visit that other grave in the mountains, the one that Zoe Berman had told her about. Kandiss had dug the grave and scratched the name on the boulder acting as headstone: LT. OWEN RYAN LAMONT.
However, Marianne didn’t give much thought to Lieutenant Lamont. Her mind was full of the virophage.
How much wind? She rose from her pallet and made her way to Big Lab. In the predawn, Lu^kaj^ho stood guard at the east door. She saw with a little shock that he carried not a clumsy Kindred gun but an Army rifle. Leo Brodie’s? Owen Lamont’s?
“I greet you, Dr. Jenner,” he said in lilting English.
“I greet you, Lu^kaj^ho.”
A lot of wind, fresh and cool, in a starlit sky. In this continent slightly south of Kindred’s equator, winds blew east to west. This couldn’t possibly be better. The virophage would be carried across much of the landmass. If, of course, it was actually an airborne pathogen. If there was enough of it. If it could protect humans as well as leelees. If—
Enough.
Somewhere in Big Lab a baby cried, but no one else seemed awake. Marianne knew better—Branch would already be seated at what remained of their equipment, now all crowded into the leelee lab. The young man apparently never slept, no more than the Rangers did.
In the lab, Branch peered through a Kindred microscope.
“They’re too small to see,” Marianne said, although of course Branch knew that. Even the virophage’s host, R. sporii, was too small to see. They needed an electromicrograph, which of course they did not have.
“Look at this,” Branch said, without preamble. He got up to let Marianne at the microscope.
“Branch, there’s wind.”
He smiled. “I heard it. But look at this, Marianne. It’s tissue from the lung of an infected leelee.”
Marianne sat on the stool. As soon as the smoke cleared around the colony ship, Branch had gone inside, heavily masked. He had come out with sacks of leelees, chittering and smelling just as bad as their planet-bound cousins, even as other leelees found their own way out of the ship. Branch had described an interior full of flourishing plants, teeming fungi, and bodies that were nothing but skeletons, all soft tissue having been microscopically consumed by forty years of hothouse microbes. The whole thing, Branch said, had looked like a terrarium from a horror movie, and Marianne had decided that she didn’t need to experience it. They had the leelees.
Branch had set up fans inside the ship to blow infected air out, but that hadn’t been enough. They had needed wind, and now they had it. The incubation period of R. sporii in humans—Terran humans, anyway—was three days, which was how long the spore cloud had been on Kindred. Not that nonscientists could tell that: the cloud was silent, diffuse, invisible. But those infected would fall sick today.
Unless the virophages protected them—completely, partially, or not at all.
This made Bra
nch’s research pointless, even if he’d had the most sophisticated equipment at the CDC. But research was what drove Branch, just as it drove Marianne, and so he was researching. Cultures with cells grown from sacrificed leelees dotted the room.
The image in the microscope showed three intact lung cells and parts of two others. Somewhere in each cell, too tiny to be seen, was R. sporii, and somewhere inside that was the virophage. The cells looked normal.
“You showed me this before,” Marianne said. “It just shows that the leelees aren’t infected.”
“It shows their lungs aren’t infected with Avenger. Now—”
“Wait—what did you just call the virophage?”
“Avenger. Well, I have to refer to it as something. The first virophage ever discovered was called Sputnik!”
“I know,” Marianne said. Sputnik was Russian for “fellow traveler,” and the researchers who discovered it had an unfortunate penchant for whimsy.
“Anyway, now look at this. They’re neurons from an infected leelee’s brain, from the area that seems to correspond roughly to Terran mammals’ cerebellum.” He removed the slide from the microscope and replaced it with another. “I stained them to emphasize receptors.”
Marianne peered into the ’scope. Four neurons—Branch had always prepared outstanding slides—and none of them looked like the cerebellum neurons of leelees sacrificed from Kindred. There were more axons and more receptors, bristly outgrowths that made the cells look like particularly dense hedgehogs.
She said, “I’m a geneticist, not a neurologist, but that looks like a lot more going on in the leelee brain than in the leelees we’re familiar with.” She glanced at a cage of live leelees, chittering and stinking. “Have you observed any behavioral differences in the ones you captured from the ship?”
“Nothing. And of course there’s no reason to think the virophage is responsible, but still … That’s an awful lot of evolution to have occurred in forty years without some unusual trigger.”
Marianne stood. “If it is evolution. If it is due to the virophage. But it doesn’t matter right now. The only thing that matters right now is the effect the virophage has on R. Sporii in the human body.”
“I know,” Branch said. “But … still … if only I had a gene sequencer and electromicrograph!”
* * *
Three days later, in midafternoon, the first Kindred died of R. sporii.
It was an adolescent boy in the camp. Marianne never knew his name. The compound had no doctor now, and when a young girl came running across the perimeter for help, Marianne had none to give. Noah went back with the girl, returning to the compound a half hour later. He looked dazed.
“It happens so fast,” he said.
“I know,” Marianne said. She had seen it on Terra: adult respiratory distress syndrome, a catchall diagnosis. Gasps for air as lung tissue became heavier and heavier with fluid seeping into the lungs. Each breath required more and more effort. An X-ray of lung tissue—if they had that equipment here—would show “whiteout”—so much fluid in the lungs increasing the radiological density that the image looked like a snowstorm.
Noah clutched at Marianne’s arm as if he were a child again and she, his mother, could fix anything wrong. But she couldn’t, and in a moment he dropped her arm.
Marianne scanned the horizon. Trees waved gracefully in a west–east wind. Would this poor boy’s death be an isolated case? An outlier or a harbinger?
Science always proceeded by trial and error, by living with doubt, by refusing to grab prematurely onto certainty. But this was a huge trial, a massive amount of doubt, and devoid of any certainty at all.
Wailing rose from the camp.
Zoe Berman, in full gear, approached Marianne and Noah. “Go inside now,” she said, eyes on the camp, “just in case. Lieutenant Brodie’s orders.”
And just who had given Brodie that field promotion? Marianne didn’t ask. The military unit, grown ever larger with Kindred recruits, was something she didn’t understand, nor want to. With a final glance at the camp, the blowing trees, the clear sky, she went inside.
It was going to be a long day, an even longer night, and no one would sleep.
* * *
Isabelle stood in the doorway of the ready room, a child in her arms. At least the kid wasn’t crying, Leo thought. And it was alive, unlike the children who had died when he fired on the ship. That had been necessary, but he knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life. Awake, asleep, in dreams. Maybe someday he could talk about it with somebody—Isabelle?—but not now. He said, “Any more deaths?”
“No. And according to the radio, the spore cloud hit days ago ago.”
Leo nodded. He hated not being out there with his peacekeeping force, but Dr. Jenner had told him that if he did any more climbing around, he would tear open his stitches and die. Leo didn’t know if this was true and he suspected she didn’t know, either, but it worked okay for him to direct the mission from the ready room. He got reports about the camp from Lu^kaj^ho’s infiltrators, about any external threats from Kandiss and Zoe, about the vaccinated kids inside the compound from Isabelle, about radio reports from Isabelle and Noah Jenner, the only two left who were fluent in both Kindred and English now that Salah Bourgiba was dead.
Did Isabelle mourn him? She looked heavy-eyed and limp, but everybody looked that way. Waiting, not war, was the real hell.
He said, “Well, that’s good, right? Maybe the virophage worked. At least in the camp.”
“Maybe.” The child whimpered and she shifted it in her arms. Isabelle looked good with the dark-haired, copper-skinned baby. If she married a Kindred, her child would look more like Lily, a mix. But Isabelle hadn’t married any of the Kindred men.
She said, in an attempt at lightheartedness, “‘Lieutenant’?”
“Lu^kaj^ho started that shit,” Leo said, with disgust. “I think because Owen was called that, he assumes it’s a title for whoever is CO. Then Zoe did it, one of her twisted jokes. Only Kandiss has the sense to ignore it.”
“It’s not a joke, Leo. Your unit wants you to be lieutenant.”
“Yeah, but the US Army back home has other ideas.”
“Are you going back home, Leo? If it becomes possible?”
So they’d arrived here. Already. It took Leo by surprise—the timing did, anyway. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t, in the long stretches of sitting here on his pallet, thought about it.
He looked her straight in the eyes. “I don’t know, Isabelle—am I? Going back to Terra?”
But whatever he’d hoped to see—some sign, some plea—wasn’t there. However, it wasn’t not there, either, a maddening state of push-pull. If Isabelle had been a different woman, he’d have thought she was jerking him around. But he knew she wasn’t.
All right, then—let’s do this. He said, “Did you love him?”
She didn’t play any games about pretending not to understand. “No.”
He digested this: the speed and firmness with which she answered. He said slowly, “A lot depends on what happens with the cloud. If the virophage doesn’t work and everybody dies, and if it’s possible to reprogram the ship, will you go back to Terra?”
“I don’t know. If the virophage does work, or partially works, and there is still a civilization here to rebuild—will you stay on Kindred and help build it?”
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “I’m in the Army, you know.”
She grimaced. They both knew that too many Army regulations had already been jettisoned. And what did he face if he went back to Terra? Court-martial?
He said, stalling, “You know these people a lot better than I do—is there going to be what Tony Schrupp says, rioting and looting and a general breakdown?”
“I don’t know,” Isabelle said, “but I don’t think so. You know what, Leo—I think we all see the world mostly like we are inside. Tony was always a suspicious grabber, and so he’s suspicious about grabbing. That’s why he built Haven. Marianne has
always put her faith in science, and she still does. And you were always a leader underneath, making your own judgments, and so now you can lead the unit.”
“You don’t know me, Isabelle. I was no leader.”
“Maybe you were and didn’t know it. We might need an army, Leo. We never did before, but before there was enough to go around easily, with very old laws and customs and such. If all that goes, things might be more disrupted. Humans aren’t naturally peaceful. We’re biologically hierarchical and territorial. Only abundance, a monoculture, and intense indoctrination kept us so peaceful for so long.”
The stilted words sounded like Salah Bourgiba, the intellectual. Maybe it was all true—actually, it was what Leo himself believed, just not in such fancy words—but he still felt a flash of jealousy that she was using Bourgiba’s phrases.
Heemur^ka appeared in the doorway and spoke in rapid Kindred. Leo felt his adrenaline jump-start. But then Isabelle translated.
“He says no more deaths in the camp, no planned violence. People are waiting to see what happens with the spore cloud.”
“Which means that if more people die, there could be trouble. Here’s what I want you to tell him.” Leo laid out the operation orders in case of attack, and everything else went on the back burner.
For now.
* * *
Austin woke with a start. He had struggled to stay awake all night, to hear everything, but sleep had grabbed him without his even feeling it, and now it was morning.! Shit!
The radio in Big Lab still received broadcasts. Noah sat on a cushion near it, a cup of nakl in his hands, leaning toward the radio to shut out the noise of fussing little kids and a wailing baby.
“Noah-kal—what news?”
“One more death in the camp, and other places are reporting only a few so far. That means that either the virophage mostly worked or—”
“I know what it means,” Austin snapped. When were they going to stop treating him like a little kid? He stalked to the piss closet, then the showers. When he was clean, he listened to the radio for an hour before going outside. The sun was well over the horizon, and the wind blew.
