CROSSFIRE

  "I never noticed it. What?"

  "That's why I like you," Nan said, and the grin was back. "You never notice anything complicated about people. I don't know what's chewing Jake. I don't care, either. Gail, don't go back to Mira City tomorrow. The place can stumble by without you for one more day. Come with me to the Fur colonies with those Vines."

  Gail was touched. Nan had put aside the sarcasm, the fencing, the nasty strike-before-you-get-struck pose. She was asking as simply and straightforwardly as if they'd been lovers for years.

  "I guess Mira Corp can wait one more day. But one more thing—"

  Nan leaned over to kiss her, and Gail forgot the one more thing. This battered, vulnerable, bedeviled, relentless, untrustworthy girl ... Gail hadn't ever expected to feel like this again. It was worth giving up one day of water supply and waste management.

  The next day she wasn't so sure. George, who either had slept well or didn't need much sleep, woke everybody well before dawn. "We need to eat, pack up, be ready to go when the Vines are."

  "Go where?" Gail said grumpily. "Do your aliens furnish an itinerary, George?"

  "I'll ask when they get up. Meanwhile, I've been working out a theory"—he looked at her face—"but I'll tell it to somebody else."

  "Good idea."

  Lucy, apparently another person at ease with morning, was ladling out bowls of hot noy, a nutrition-maxed soy synth, high fiber, that actually tasted pretty good. Gail took a bowl of noy and a cup of coffee. She consumed them standing up, shivering a little in the predawn chill and assessing who was in what shape.

  Dr. Shipley looked terrible, as if he'd hardly slept. He was clumsily helping Mueller carry equipment out of the soon-to-be-abandoned tower. The beacon was being left on, presumably in case more Vines from the mother ship, if there were any more Vines, wished to come downstairs. Ingrid and Karim were taking down the large inflatable, and Nan the small one. That left only Jake. Gail didn't see him until he came up behind her.

  "I just talked to Faisal and—"

  "He's up already?"

  "And had his morning workout. Not everybody's an unathletic slug, Gail."

  "Ummmm," she said, too groggy to bicker.

  "Faisal said everything's running smoothly in Mira City. They don't need us."

  She said, "You don't look like you think that's good news."

  Jake shrugged. "Nobody's ever indispensable, but I suppose we all would like to think we are. Anyway, the arrangements here are all set. Finally. I wanted Mueller to drive the rover back and report to Lieutenant Wortz, but he said no so—"

  Gail choked on a mouthful of coffee. " 'Said no'? Since when does our security team override your orders?"

  Jake gazed at her seriously. "Since never. But I also talked to Dr. Shipley, and he wants to stay close to Mueller until he's sure Mueller isn't going to have some sort of stress-and-rebuilt psychotic reaction to everything he's done."

  "Good God, Jake, do we want to take that sort of person with us when we have aliens along who are capable of who-knows-what? Two sets of aliens. Why don't you send Shipley and Mueller both back to Mira City in the rover?"

  "Because Shipley won't go. He says he has to make a peace testimony. And I won't send Mueller alone, without supervision."

  A peace testimony. A psychotic reaction. Aliens. "When did the loco weeds start controlling the garden?"

  "Since always. Anyway, you have your own personal loco weed you're bringing along. Nan's no worse than Dr. Shipley."

  Gail said, "Interesting that you're defending him. I thought he made you uneasy."

  "Can we stay with the topic here, Gail? Mueller, Shipley, Lucy, and I are going in the small skimmer, and the other five of you in the large one. Karim can pilot. He's had experience."

  "And what about the rover?"

  Jake pulled at his face. "It's staying here for now. We may need it after we return from this fact-finding expedition."

  "Is that what it is? Seems more like a sideshow. Listen, Jake, I'm going for only one day. If the Vines are conducting a guided tour for longer than that, the small skimmer is going back to Mira City, with either Mueller or Karim piloting. Can we agree on this?"

  "Yes," Jake said, and suddenly he looked very tired. "I may go with you. I'm not really any use here, you know. George and Ingrid and Nan are the only ones actually equipped to make contact with the Vines. The Vines don't seem like a threat to us, and no negotiation with them seems necessary. They just tell us anything we ask."

  She said slowly, "Doesn't that make you suspicious?"

  "Of what?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "But so little reticence just doesn't seem ... prudent."

  "And how many prudent plants do you know? But Karim did say something to me this morning..."

  Gail felt cold. Whatever Karim had said, she wasn't going to like it. "What?"

  "He said that if the mother ship is a McAndrew Drive type of thing, and it's drawing energy from the vacuum to power an acceleration that matches the gravitational force of—"

  "Skip the technical details," Gail said. "What's the problem Karim sees?"

  "The Vines have a huge amount of energy available in that drive. If they're really at war with the Furs, why don't they just attack the Fur planet with the plasma drive? It would make a formidable weapon, Karim says. Why 'create' colonies genetically identical to their enemies and then work at creating molecules to keep them alive but harmless?"

  "Oh, God, Jake, I don't know. Maybe they want slaves. Or trading partners. Or zoo animals. How can we tell what creatures so different from us might want?"

  "We could ask them. And I intend to."

  "You do that," Gail said. "Meanwhile, let's get this circus in the air."

  Someone, probably George, must have arranged things last night with the Vines, because they didn't appear. Instead their shuttle lifted off just after dawn, a silvery egg with a long tail. It looked, Gail thought, like one of the one-celled creatures with a flagellum that she vaguely remembered from school biology software. God, she had biology on the brain. George's influence.

  Sitting beside Nan, Gail watched Greentrees flash by below them. Even though Karim hadn't taken them very high, the planet looked different from its appearance at ground level: less alien, somehow.

  The pointy trees and strange animals and red creepers weren't distinguishable. Instead Greentrees offered sweeping savannas, winding rivers, placid blue lakes. If you ignored the foliage's being dull purple instead of green, it might almost have been Earth, an Earth primal and pristine as if twenty thousand years of human history had been undone.

  Which might not be a bad thing, Gail brooded. She seldom let herself think about Earth. Earth was Lahiri. It was also the physical and social ruin that humans had made it, now apparently even worse than when the Ariel had left. The Ariel, that Rudy Scherer had blown up rather than let fall into alien hands, and this even before Scherer knew who the aliens were and what they wanted. Had it really happened because Scherer was a rebuilt? Or because there was something ineradicably violent and destructive in human beings? The same something that was steadily destroying humanity's home world.

  Gail didn't usually think so negatively, or so abstractly. And she wasn't going to let herself do so now; there was no percentage in it. One more day of this weird atmosphere full of talk about alien warfare, and she'd be back home at Mira City, occupying herself with the useful and practical concerns that would keep Greentrees from becoming another Earth. That was what made sense.

  Determinedly she turned to George. "Did your leafy friends tell you how far until the first stop on this tour?"

  "I think we're here now," George said. "That looks like a Fur colony. But it's not one of the three we already knew about!"

  "Stop salivating, George. Maybe they'll let you have a turd to analyze."

  He said seriously, "A turd would be good."

  Gail was nervous about being attacked by wild Furs, but she needn't have worried. The three aircraft
set down near each other, and immediately Furs came racing toward them. But they stopped—or were stopped—at some barrier Gail couldn't see.

  "A force field of some type," Karim said excitedly. "But then why didn't they use it around their shuttle at our camp? No, of course, it's probably not impenetrable to the energy weapons Mueller used. But then later, when we made first contact? No, they had decided to risk it because of all that quiet sitting Shipley made us do the day before."

  This was going to be easy, Gail realized. The scientists were going to ask and then answer all their own questions. She didn't have to say or do anything.

  The Vines disembarked with the usual precipitous rolling of their carts down the too-steep ramp. Karim guessed, "That's because the shuttle wasn't theirs. It wasn't designed for those carts. I'll bet they captured it from Furs."

  The Furs clustered at the invisible barrier didn't look as if they could create shuttles. Neither were they the impassive, incurious clods from the first Fur colony the humans had discovered.

  Nan said breathlessly, "They're not disabled, not intoxicated, I don't think they're as warlike as my Furs on the Cheyenne subcontinent..."

  No, they didn't look warlike. In fact, many of them had children clinging to their backs. Maybe even most of them. And there was something else, something about their size or coloring or something...

  George said, "They're all female. Every one of them. Look at their backs—no crests."

  Ingrid said, "The males could be out hunting. Or have some sort of ritual sequestration. Or—"

  "Or this colony is all female," Nan said harshly. "To see if they're more controllable that way. Another phase of the genetic experiment."

  Gail looked at her. Nan wore a complex expression: distaste, sorrow, the anger that with her never lay far below the surface. So that's how it was going to go. Nan had been fascinated by both alien species, but now she was choosing the Furs. Her first contact. The experimented-upon. The underdog.

  George was babbling excitedly. "On Earth there's a species of mite, Brevipalpus phoenicis, whose members are all haploid. Eggs develop without fertilization. The genome contains an incorporated bacterium that feminizes any males. There's an evolutionary advantage: the mites don't have to divide energy resources between two sexes, so the species can survive with a lower rate of reproduction. Also, it avoids all the costs of sexual reproduction with competing X- and Y-chromosomes."

  Ingrid said, "These haploids, if that's what they are, seem to have all sorts of energy. The colony seems to be flourishing. There are three new structures that I can see going up over there, and look at all those healthy-looking offspring!"

  Lucy, recording furiously, said, "I wish we could go into the village to see how the levels of tools and art compare with the other Fur encampments."

  The Vines rolled their carts right up to the barrier. A bioarm, which still gave Gail the creeps, snaked out of one cart and fastened itself on the invisible wall. Three or four Furs, jabbering, crowded close. Something seemed to be happening, perhaps some exchange of bodily fluids. Gail shuddered.

  She said to Nan, trying to lighten her own mood, "A colony of all women sounds good, but if there's never any sex..." Nan didn't even hear her. Like Ingrid, George, and Lucy, she was so involved with the two alien species in front of her that her own kind might not have existed.

  Gail wandered back toward the assembled aircraft. Karim was again peering into the open door of the Vines' shuttle—did he have their permission to do that? He must have at least had Jake's, since Jake stood beside Karim, talking earnestly.

  Then, more quickly than she'd expected, it was over. Everyone clambered back into his, her, or its transport. Gail wished she gone in the other skimmer. Nan was ignoring her, and George didn't seem able to shut up.

  "I talked to Alph. He said—"

  "Alph?" Gail demanded. "Which Vine is that? And how do you know it's a 'he'?"

  "I don't," George said. "I'm just calling them Alpha, Beta, Gamma."

  "That's what we called the moons."

  "So what? I told you, they don't use sound-wave communication among themselves, it's all an exchange of chemical signals. Their real names would be totally meaningless to us. I talked to—"

  "If they communicate by exchanged molecules," Gail said, feeling belligerent, "then how do they communicate across great distances?"

  "I asked them that, too. Alph said—I think this is what he meant—that they don't. Most Vines are interconnected somehow, so a chemical signal just goes on and on until everyone 'hears' it. Or maybe they're all so interconnected only one part of the organism needs to hear it. I think communication must be very slow on their planet."

  That figured. Gail remembered the Vines sitting in the sunlight, doing nothing, for hours and hours. "But what about communication through space? To the mother ship?"

  Karim, at the control console, said, "They have Fur technology for that. I would bet it's Fur technology. Maybe before they got it, they didn't have any space program."

  "I talked to Alph," George repeated forcefully. "They do have a bio-based technology. They'd never left their planet until the Furs started the war. But now they have a few outpost colonies, and this group of Vines comes from there. It's much closer than the hundred light-years from Greentrees to their home world. Both places have some feature I couldn't understand, except that I got the impression it was very, very important.

  "And another thing—they're hoping to find a genetic way to render the Furs harmless without killing them. Killing is anathema to Vines. That may be philosophical, but I think it's equally likely to be biological. If you're essentially one large, loosely connected, slow-moving organism that's self-sustaining with sunlight and water and your own decayed moltings, there's no evolutionary advantage to selecting for murder. It would be like killing yourself."

  "You sound," Nan said in a deadly quiet tone, "as if you approve of the Vines."

  George was too excited, or too uninterested, to pay attention to Nan's tone. "Of course I approve of them. Apart from how interesting they are biologically. An intelligent, nonviolent, planet-conserving species ... what's not to like? If humanity had been like the Vines, Earth wouldn't have been wrecked."

  Nan said, "Oh, there's nothing to not like, George. Nothing except the fact that your Vines are experimenting with other sentient beings, DNA-based beings like yourself, creating them just to destroy them while they develop an efficient method of genocide. Nothing to not like."

  "I don't think—"

  "Obviously not," Nan said coldly. "The Vines are no better than Scherer's crew, creating clones to slaughter for biological advantage."

  "The difference, and it's crucial—" Ingrid began hotly, and Gail tuned out. God, she was sick of these arguments about aliens. She pulled out her comlink and opened the channel to Faisal.

  He didn't answer. Damn, Gail had thought he was more responsible than that; he'd agreed to keep his link beside him at all times. She comlinked Robert Takai, Mira's chief engineer.

  Takai didn't answer.

  Neither did Thekla Barrington at the farm.

  "Lend me your comlink," she said to George, who passed it over without pausing in his expostulating.

  She couldn't link Faisal on George's handheld, either.

  Gail sat chewing her lip. It probably wasn't anything. She'd lost track of which side of the planet they were on. Of course, the satellite system theoretically made comlink possible from anywhere on the planet, but if one comsat was malfunctioning, and the skimmer just happened to be out of range of the next one, it was possible that there would be a gap in geographical coverage. Wasn't that possible? She would have asked Karim, but he was busy piloting.

  It was probably just a comsat glitch. That's all it was.

  20

  In the other, smaller skimmer, the flight was completely silent. Mueller piloted, and since all Jake could see was the back of Mueller's head, Jake couldn't assess the soldier's expression. Shipley sat with hi
s head back against the seat cushion and his eyes closed, sleeping or meditating or praying or whatever it was he did. Lucy sat beside Jake, gazing out the window.

  As the skimmer touched down at the second Fur camp, Lucy said, "Oh! This is the intoxicated one!" Jake, who hadn't been there before and had only seen the vid of the tipsy Furs, didn't recognize the place. But Lucy's comment cheered him. Why should that be?

  He searched for the answer and found it: because he was unnerved by the earnest, cosmic, pacifist Vines, and also by Shipley's quick understanding that they were pacifists. Some drunken hilarity among a DNA-based species promised a welcome contrast.

  George Fox was already off the large skimmer, waiting impatiently for the Vines to emerge from their shuttle. "I wonder if the Vines will erect a temporary electronic wall around this village, too. What do you think, Jake?"

  "Haven't a clue," Jake said.

  Ingrid said, "Possibly not. These Furs don't look like they're going to be rushing us anytime soon."

  This was true. As they walked cautiously toward the village, Jake saw that it was in a dilapidated state. Roof beams hung at a crazy angle over huts with half the thatch missing. One stone hearth was not only broken but scattered, as though someone had hurled all the rocks gleefully in various directions. Weeds covered the one garden patch he could see. There were no Furs in evidence.

  "Sleeping it off?" he said to George.

  George frowned. "That psychotropic molecule shouldn't produce much of a hangover. At least, it doesn't in us."

  Jake refrained from saying the obvious. A pair of Furs staggered around the corner of a hut and lurched toward them.

  Instantly Mueller had a weapon in his hand. Shipley, whom Jake hadn't noticed getting out of the skimmer, laid a hand on Mueller's arm. It wasn't necessary. The Furs staggered a few more paces, then collapsed into each other and hung on, making a noise from wide-open mouths. Laughing? Jake didn't know, but he had a clear view of the aliens' impressive teeth and he backed away. The Furs seemed oblivious of the humans. They laughed (if that's what it was) until they fell over, at which point the male started groping the female's belly and the female passed out.