Crucible

  Finally she had told him no.

  And here he was telling the plan to Lucy as if Alex had agreed to it.

  Alex plopped down on a rock jutting up from two inches of rushing river. Her boots and cuffs were wet, as was the rock. She was too upset to care. Lucy, Jake, Julian … no, don’t think about Julian. Too much pain. Think only about defeating the Furs.

  How did you avoid thinking about someone you loved who was probably trying to kill you?

  “You can’t think clearly just now,” Jake had said last night, with compassion. Was he telling the truth or just trying to manipulate her again? Alex could no longer tell. Everything was too complicated, including her emotions.

  Breathe deeply.

  It was a glorious Greentrees morning. Fresh warm air blew above the sparkling river. The opposite bank was shaded by purple trees, the long thin leaves on their lower branches dangling into the water, which tugged at them in further elongation. Lacy moonrushes turned their tiny bluish petals to the fading sun. Overhead a flock of sue-birds wheeled and cried. And dripping down the bank, an enormous red creeper, capable of tangling and digesting small animals, waited for its prey.

  Something flew into sight on the distant horizon above the red creeper.

  Alex shrank back against the riverbank. She ran back to the others, who had already seen it and were moving Jake’s chair to the deepest part of the overhang. Natalie snatched up a breakfast bowl left to rinse in the river. With all their meager belongings they waited, hardly breathing, under the protection of dirt and rock.

  The skimmer, flying very low, appeared over the top of the opposite bank, flew over the river, and disappeared.

  Ben breathed, “if they saw the rover under those branches …”

  “They didn’t,” Alex said. “Or they’d have landed.” Hatred flooded her, caustic as lye. Julian had probably not been in the skimmer; he would be holed up somewhere in a new “command post” as primitive as Alex’s own hideout. She was hiding from him, lie was hiding from the Furs. But he’d risked at least two of his Terran soldiers in the skimmer to hunt her down.

  Or maybe she was wrong. She had not responded with a broadcast of her own to Julian’s announcement of her death. To that extent, anyway, she’d listened to Jake. So maybe Julian wasn’t hunting her. Maybe he was hunting Furs. Or just scouting out his new planet, taken by treachery and murder and pointless destruction.

  Ben said, “The skimmer is heading west.”

  “Good,” Lucy said. “We need to drive mostly south.”

  Something else flashed above the river and was gone. “Oh my God!” Natalie cried. “That was a Fur shuttle!”

  A second later they heard the explosion.

  No one spoke. Then Alex said shakily, “Wait. If the shuttle had wanted to, it could have just annihilated the skimmer. But it exploded it instead. The Furs wanted it to register on human displays, so we would know… so we know…”

  “Yes,” Jake said. “And probably the Furs want the wreckage to stay on the ground, too. It’s a decoy to lure humans to check for survivors. We’re not going anywhere near it.”

  “But if there are survivors—” Ben began, and stopped.

  Natalie said, “Commander Martin might come to look for his survivors.”

  “No, Natalie,” Jake said. “He won’t do that.”

  Natalie looked puzzled. Alex said, “The Furs will have left surveillance equipment by the crash, Natalie. Julian will anticipate that.”

  Jake said to her, “Now you’re starting to think like a soldier.” There was no pleasure in his voice.

  Natalie said, “Then we can’t stay here, either!”

  Jake said, “Not unless you’re willing to hide under a riverbank twenty-four hours a day, every day.” He spoke to Natalie but his eyes were on Alex.

  “All right, Jake,” she said.’“We’ll leave now. But not all together.”

  They loaded Jake and his chair into the rover. Ben drove it south along the creek, staying under tree cover as much as he could. Alex watched them drive away and thought how brave both of them were: the boy whose loyalties had been pulled and jerked like a balky tree stump, and the old man who kept his frail body going by the sheer will of his wily mind.

  She might never see either of them again. They had the dangerous part of this insane mission, which included splitting up in order to increase survival odds for at least some of them. In the rover Jake and Ben, heading for Karim’s biomass, would be far more exposed than would the three others. Julian’s skimmer was gone, but the Furs still had one or more shuttles, plus who knew what sort of land transport. The Fur mother ship orbited above Greentrees, as did Julian’s Crucible. Julian had the loyalty of all the humans on Greentrees who didn’t know what he had done, which was all the humans on Greentrees except five.

  Maybe nine, if Lucy’s “coded” message had indeed reached Karim and if Karim had indeed known what the hell Lucy meant. Alex doubted both these things.

  The rover disappeared from sight. Alex slid back down the bank, where Natalie handed her a pack made up of as many essentials as each of them could carry. They’d buried everything else. Alex, Natalie, and Lucy were to stick to the creek, sheltering beside its wild banks and following it south to the rendezvous point with the rover. If, of course, the rover actually returned.

  Natalie asked, “Do you really think Ben and Mr. Holman can get to MiraCi-

  ty?”

  Alex glanced at the girl, then bit back her first sarcastic reply: There is no Mira City to get to! Natalie deserved more than that. She, too, had been incredibly brave and loyal.

  “I hope so,” Alex said gently. “Meanwhile, let’s get going.”

  The three women started to walk along the creek.

  32

  M I R A C I T Y P L A I N

  He drifted in and out of sleep, an old man who knew he confused past and present, thinking and dreaming. Beta Vine emerged from his shuttle for the first time in his little domed cart. Lucy Lasky scattered kisses on Jake’s sleeping face. Alex’s face became her aunt’s, Gail’s, dead for twenty years. Furs imprisoned humans, then more humans, then more and more until all of Terra howled inside cages with invisible force-field walls. And over all, Star Chu sang that ditty all the young people liked:

  “On Greentrees we are For good, but is it good,

  How would I know, all I know For sure is yooouuuuu…

  Yooouuuu…

  Yooouuuuu…”

  “Mr. Holman,” Ben said in his respectful young voice, “you said to wake you at the start of the kill-clean zone. We’re here.”

  Jake forced open his eyes. Every bone ached from jostling along in the rover, even though Natalie had given him painkillers. The patch wasn’t very effective

  because the effective ones also sedated, which Jake couldn’t permit. Painfully he leaned forward to peer through the rover’s mud-spattered windshield.

  There was nothing whatsoever to see. Ben had halted under a clump of purple trees. A few feet in front of them, all vegetation stopped. In all directions the plain was as blank as an empty display screen. No life, no remains of previous life. Sterile as a moon.

  Incongruously, he thought of Alex’s cat. Katous had gone with him to the hospital cave but had then run away. Undoubtedly the animal had been vaporized along with everything else. Alex had been fond of Katous.

  A sue-bird flew through Jake’s field of vision, squawking indignantly.

  Stupidly cheered, Jake said, “How far to Mira City?”

  Ben glanced at the rover’s display. “Another hundred miles.”

  And nothing had annihilated them yet. “Go on.”

  Ben drove onto the blankness. And yet, Jake thought, it wasn’t completely blank. Somewhere ahead were caves that had been end points for Mira City’s evacuation. It was from one of those caves that Lucy had taken him. Were people still holed up there, rationing their supplies, waiting for instructions from Alex that were not going to come? End points closest to the
city had been reserved for the old, the ill, the helpless. Jake doubted that Julian Martin would be mobilizing those Greenies anytime soon.

  Jake suddenly wondered what had happened to Alex’s efficient, perpetually disapproving assistant, Siddalee Brown. He’d always liked Siddalee.

  Ben pushed the rover as fast as it would go. They were now exposed visually as well as thermally, perfect targets. Shooting fish in a barrel, Jake thought, on a planet that technically had never had either.

  But nothing had annihilated them yet.

  Sometime later, Ben again woke him. This time Jake heard tears in the boy’s voice, which Jake tactfully ignored.

  “This is where Mira City was, Mr. Holman. Right here.”

  Jake inched forward in his seat, and Ben suddenly stopped the rover and slid down the windshield.

  Nothing. To Jake’s left the river babbled and sang. The slight hill on the right horizon must be where the mausoleum had stood.

  Nothing remained as a hint that a city had stood here—houses, manufacturies, power plant, farm, genetics laboratories, parks, children. Not so much as a sapling.

  But Ben’s young eyes were stronger than Jake’s. “Look, Mr. Holman—the groundcover’s starting to come back.” He pointed.

  A faint patch of lavender, in a depression where the soil must be wetter. An embryonic swath of Greentrees’ ubiquitous purple groundcover, tough as hide and adaptable as cockroaches. Give the plain two Terran months and it would again be in bloom, home to frebs and… and everything else native.

  “Drive toward the iron mine, Ben. Do you know where it was?”

  “My mother was a miner,” Ben said, swinging the rover around.

  The mine had been across river, away from the main section of the city that still rose in Jake’s mind. Ben pushed the rover through relative shallows, once spanned by a bridge. A mile farther, the entrance hole still gaped in the low hillside, although the building that had fronted it had vanished. In that building Ben’s mother would have directed the nanos that dug the tunnels, the robots that located the ore, and the trams that had carried it to the surface. It had been a big operation, Alex’s pride, employing at full capacity as many as seventeen people.

  “Mr. Holman, I can go in by myself. You told me where to find it.”

  “I want to go,” Jake said. But that was sheer sentiment, nothing else. The less time he and Ben spent at the blank that had been Mira City, the better. Jake slowed everything down.

  “No, you go ahead, Ben. Find it. Go quickly.”

  The boy leaped from the rover as if he’d been shot and ran toward the mine.

  Ben might have played here as a child. He might have sometimes gone to work with his highly skilled mother and frolicked on the purple hillside above her head. The eco-team would have cleared the area of red creeper and other dangerous native flora and put one of their electronic fences in place against predatory fauna. Was she dead, Ben’s miner mother? Had he played here with brothers and sisters now as dead as the city itself?

  Jake tried to fight off sleep and failed. Again the disturbing dreams, Lucy and Duncan and Alex and Rudy Scherer all mixed together, yesterday indistinguishable from today. William Shipley, the Quaker doctor who had first put the box in a secret passage of the mine, lectured Jake. “We owe it to these people, Friend Jake. We promised them.”

  “They will never come back for them,” Jake had argued. “Perpetual supercold storage is damn expensive!”

  “Nonetheless, we will keep our promise,” Shipley said tranquilly, and then the Quaker was shaking his shoulder. The doctor’s hand on Jake’s shoulder became Ben’s hand, a plastic box about one cubic foot balanced awkwardly on his other hip.

  “Mr. Holman, I found it. Just where you said.” The boy had clearly willed himself to firmness. “Now please tell me what it is and what it will do.”

  Jake looked at him. Ben had earned that much. The only reason Jake hadn’t explained before was that if they were captured, Jake hadn’t wanted Ben to possess any knowledge for which he could be tortured.

  “I’ll tell you what it is, Ben. It’s a supercold perpetual storage box, capable of preserving organic material for several millennia through fire, flood, quakes, everything but annihilating weaponry. Inside are Vine death flowers.”

  “Are what?”

  Despite everything, Jake smiled. “We don’t know what they are, either. But on their first trip to Greentrees, the Furs killed all the Vines that had landed here not long before. Before the Vines died, they tried to give us some genetic material they called their ’death flowers.’ It didn’t work; the Furs annihilated the death flowers, too. But later, when Karim and Lucy and I and others were aboard a Vine ship to—well, you know the story. The Furs annihilated those Vines, too. This time, however, when they gave humans their death flowers, we were able to keep them. When we returned to Greentrees, we hid them here in case any Vines ever came back for them, as the Vines had said would someday happen.”

  “But they never came,” Ben said.

  “No.”

  “So what are we going to do with these ’death flowers’ now?” Ben said, somewhere between bewilderment and anger. “We just risked our lives to get this box—what good is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “That’s what we’re going to find out. Get back in the rover and drive.”

  They could have gone directly to the Avery Mountains, but instead they backtracked to pick up Alex, Lucy, and Natalie. Jake had argued against this; he wanted to reach Karim’s biomass as soon as possible, and going back for the three women would add another day to the trip. But Alex had insisted and, to Jake’s surprise, Lucy had for once agreed with Alex. Jake had given in. He had opposed Alex enough already. He knew, without wanting to think about it, how much pain she felt over Julian.

  So Ben again drove at maximum speed across the kill-clean zone until he reached the relative safety of vegetation. Then he was forced to go much more slowly around or through thick stands of brush, red creeper, and purple trees. Once, rounding a copse to return to the river, the rover startled a herd of “elephants.” The ponderous, placid, evil-smelling beasts, like no elephants Jake had ever seen on Terra, stared stupidly at the rover before returning to their grazing. Ben said hastily, “I’ll move upwind.”

  “Can you make the rendezvous point before dark? I’d rather not use the lights.”

  “Mr. Holman, I’m not even sure where the rendezvous point is. We said ten miles down the creek from our camp, but that creek twists and doubles back and we weren’t even sure Alex and the others could make ten miles today. Alex is pretty old, you know.”

  Alex was forty-five. Jake didn’t point out that by Ben’s calendar Jake himself must be fossilized. He felt fossilized.

  The rover got tangled in a patch of red creeper. In the gathering gloom, Ben hadn’t seen it in time. The predatory plant mistook the rover for some large animal and shot out its tendrils to capture it.

  The tough vines wrapped themselves around any protuberances they could reach and started, much faster than anything on Earth, to climb toward the inhabitants.

  Ben slid the side panels up. “There’s a spray under the seat, Mr. Holman.”

  “Can’t you just drive out? Surely the rover is stronger than a vine?”

  “Yes, but when a friend of mine did that—” Ben suddenly faltered. The friend, Jake guessed, was probably dead.”—did that, he tore off the fuel cell water valve. Just hand me the spray.”

  Jake found it, a spray wand. Ben slid open the side shield an inch, stuck out the wand, and pushed.

  Jake said, “How long does it take to kill the whole plant?”

  “A few minutes. The eco-genemod team is—was—pretty good.”

  They waited in silence. Wild Furs materialized out of nowhere.

  Ben gasped. Jake peered through the dirty windshield. Two … three… were there four? No, only three. They stood immobile, one in front of the rover and one by each side. All three carried laser gun
s.

  “Julian Martin gave the Furs laser guns to use against the Cheyenne—” Yenmo Kang’s despairing words.

  Ben reached for his own gun.

  “No,” Jake said swiftly. “Don’t fire. Don’t move.”

  “You’re not a soldier, Mr. Holman,” said Ben, who’d been one for a few months. And then, in the first flash of bitterness Jake had seen from the boy, “You weren’t ever a soldier.”

  “But I’m still Alex’s senior adviser. And she’s in command. Don’t move. ”

  Please let Julian have made a fetish of the chain of command.

  Apparently he had. Ben hesitated, dropped his hand.

  Jake was acting on instinct, not thought, and he hated that. But there was no time to plan. “Slide down both side panels of the rover, Ben.”

  “But-“

  “That’s an order.”

  Ben obeyed. But Jake knew he wouldn’t blindly obey too much longer; Ben had, after all, made up his own mind to believe Lucy and Jake about Julian. The boy was not completely broken to military obedience; he was a Greenie.

  The three wild Furs didn’t move. They were a fearsome sight in the deep dusk: powerfully muscled, heavily furred, their high-set third eyes scanning the sky and their thick balancing tails resting just beyond the patch of withered red creeper. Three laser guns pointed at the humans in the rover.

  But the guns were only pointing, not firing.

  Jake said, “Get out of the rover, Ben, very slowly. Let them see your every move. Lift out my chair and set it up in the clear, then put me in it.”

  “Why are you making us vulnerable to them?”

  No more blind obedience. “If they wanted to attack, they’d have done so already. This is the most xenophobic species in the known galaxy. Our smell alone arouses rage in their hindbrains, or whatever the analogue is. If they’re controlling that response, it’s by an effort of will we can’t even imagine. They want cooperation from us, and that’s unprecedented.”