Crucible

  Silence, shocking as gunfire.

  Natalie twisted in her driver’s seat, her hair dripping and wild. “Ben?”

  “Passed out,” Jon said from beneath Ben’s bulk. “Probably a good thing.”

  Karim said, “Jake?”

  Jake croaked, “I’m fine.”

  “Let’s get out.”

  They climbed, bruised and soaking wet, from the rover. Kueilan, clutching her medkit, grabbed blankets and arranged them on the ground for Jake and Ben. Kent and Jon began gathering armloads of brush to further camouflage both rover and people.

  Karim stumbled deeper into the trees, trying to see how much cover they actually had. The forest seemed pretty dense; they were probably safe for the moment. But they had little food, minimal weapons, no plan against Julian Martin. And Alex had been left behind.

  Karim picked his way back to the others. Above, branches entwined in a thick canopy. A night bird cried, then fell silent. Greentrees’ night smell surrounded him, sweetly spicy. God, how he’d missed that smell, that bird cry, in that other “forest,” on the sterile Vine world! That hellish alien nightmare world …

  Karim suddenly stood completely still among the trees. He knew now what he should have done at the biomass site.

  Now that it was too late.

  Or maybe not. He ran the rest of the short way to the rover, crashing into trees, tripping over roots. Beside the rover a powertorch shone downward, onto Ben’s still figure. By its feeble light Karim grabbed Natalie’s arm.

  “Natalie, how much power is left in the rover? How much? We have to go back!”

  37

  T H E A V E R Y M O U N T A I N S

  Something was wrong. Alex, weak and still feverish, couldn’t at first find the words for what it was. She opened her eyes, was stabbed by blinding light, closed them again. Slowly she turned her head, which set off cascades of pain inside it. And when she opened her eyes again, she realized that turning her head had been futile. The light was everywhere. It was weak daylight.

  She lay on a cot. That was what was wrong.

  Cool dank cave walls rose a foot away on either side of the cot. Evidently her cot sat in an alcove inside a cave. A clean blanket covered Alex. She was naked. As she watched, helpless, weaker than she had ever been in her life, a hairy figure passed across her field of vision at the foot of the bed, outside the alcove. It was a Fur.

  The odd, distinctive smell came to her a moment later. Furs, all right.

  She tried to piece it together. Wild Furs didn’t have cots and clean blankets. A space Fur? But the alien’s pelt had been matted and dirty; she was sure she’d seen that much. And somehow the creature moved wild. But then shouldn’t it be sick? She’d breathed on the Furs, the virus was supposed to be so contagious …

  Alex strained to remember. “They’ll probably just return me to you,” she had argued to Karim, before she’d stopped discussing and simply issued orders. “A female is a piece of lost property.” Had that happened? Yes, she thought she remembered being picked up by the wild Fur, carried back along the river toward ihe human camp … then what? She couldn’t remember.

  Clenching her teeth, she tried to sit up, but fell back weakly on the cot. It rattled against the stone wall.

  She had definitely seen a wild Fur, and now she realized that it had been accompanied by another figure, mostly hidden behind the alien. And the Fur had not looked sick. Either the incubation period was longer than Karim remembered, or else something had gone wrong. “It’s possible,” said Jon, the biologist, “that this group will be immune to the virus. They’re several generations separated from the Fur group the Vines created the virus for, remember. Also on a different world. Viruses mutate and immune systems develop—the whole genetic thing at a microbial level changes amazingly fast. And your Vines on that ship had never actually seen the Furs created on Greentrees. They had only very old samples from the space Furs.”

  She waited, unable to do anything else. Even if Jon was right, and the virus had failed to infect the wild Furs, where had they brought her? And why? And how did wild Furs have a human cot and blanket?

  She examined the edge of the blanket. Alex was tray-o; she recognized goods produced anywhere in Mira City. This was from the Trimball manufactury, run by New Quakers. Strong, well made, durable, warm.

  Now she remembered something else. The wild Fur that she’d briefly glimpsed, the dirty matted alien with the terrifying teeth and third eye on the top of its head—it had been crestless. A female. Now nothing at all made sense. Wild Fur females, the prey of the space Fur gene pool, were always kept away from danger. Not even Nan Frayne, Alex had understood, had been able to talk to a female. Unlike their technologically advanced cousins, wild Fur society was patriarchal and strictly gender divided. What was a female wild Fur doing observing Alex?

  Julian Martin walked into the alcove. “Hello, Alex.”

  So much emotion swamped her that she thought she might faint. She did not.

  “Don’t stare at me with such hatred,” Julian said. “You’re too weak to spare the effort. No, you won’t give your pneumonia, or whatever it is, to me, not even if it’s caused by a Greentrees microbe. I’ve got immune-system genemods your biologists can’t imagine.”

  Alex said nothing.

  “I wasn’t sure you were alive until I found Siddalee Brown. She’d had a tracer sewed into the Threadmore in your command bunker, did you know that? A new invention of Chu Corporation, infrasonic, nothing my equipment picked up. But she knew where you were, and she told me.”

  Bile rose in Alex’s throat. Siddalee would never have told Julian voluntarily; she’d never trusted Julian. The image of Lau-Wah’s tortured body rose in Alex’s mind.

  “Not that you’ve been much of a threat to me since the Fur attack,” Julian said. “I expected you to make a broadcast, Alex. You didn’t. That was Jake Holman’s insight, wasn’t it? Where is he?”

  So it was Jake that Julian really wanted. Of course. Julian had to fight the space Furs for Greentrees. Jake was the only one who had successfully done that before. Julian wanted Jake’s invaluable assistance. He didn’t know about Karim and Lucy.

  “I know that last incapacitating stroke of Holman’s was faked,” Julian said, “so don’t try to pretend otherwise. I talked to that void-brained teenaged girl who helped him to his transport during the evacuation. The one with your cat.”

  What faked incapacitating stroke? What teenage girl?

  Julian said, “You don’t have a poker face, Alex. You never did. You probably don’t even know what poker is; they don’t seem to play it on Greentrees. Never mind, darling. You just told me you don’t know anything about Holman’s playacting, and you were telling the truth. Do you know where Holman is?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “Don’t… Siddalee … Lau-Wah …”

  He moved closer, bent toward her cot to stare at her. His crotch was level with her face. His brilliant green eyes under their thick black lashes glittered scornfully.

  “So you’re afraid of torture. You disappoint me, Alex. Although I probably should have expected it of Greenie softness. All right, darling, no torture. I promise you a quick and merciful death if you tell me where Holman is.”

  Alex started to cry. Tears falling on the Quaker blanket, too weak to lift her head, she gave him the coordinates of the hospital-cave end point where Jake had been taken during the evacuation.

  “No,” he snapped. “We looked there!”

  “After you looked. We saw… you,” she blubbered. “We thought—Jake thought—you wouldn’t have the manpower to check again…”

  Julian stared at her a long time. Finally he nodded. “All right, Alex, I believe you. Provisionally. I’ll check the cave.”

  She had bought Jake and Karim some time. To do what? Alex didn’t know, couldn’t think. She kept picturing Siddalee—faithful, picky, fatally maternal Siddalee …

  And she, Alex Cutler, had loved Julian. She, Alexandra Hope Cutler, Mira City tr
ay-o.

  Now the tears of rage and shame were real.

  They didn’t stay in the cave, wherever it was. Alex, still wrapped only in her blanket, was dumped into a transport. The vehicle must be Terran, brought down from the Crucible; there was nothing like it on Greentrees. It was huge, a long rectangle evidently divided by internal partitions, since the section that held Alex was nowhere near the length of the whole.

  She rode with five female wild Furs, all but one bound tightly with tanglefoam. They sat beside her and made a terrible keening noise as soon as the door closed, creating total darkness. The noise echoed off the transport’s metal walls. Bodies shifted in the dark. They were all trying to move as far away from Alex as the cramped space would permit. Did she smell that bad to them?

  Where were the males? What was Julian doing?

  She tried to reason like him, although the effort brought yet more shame. The space Furs wanted wild Fur females. Therefore Julian was collecting them, as negotiating chips. He’d terrified the creatures into obeying him. What had he done with the males? Killed them, probably.

  Or maybe not. Perhaps only the males had become infected by Alex, and had then died. Jon hadn’t mentioned that anything like hat could happen, and Alex didn’t know enough biology to know if it was possible. But maybe it was, and Julian had collected the surviving females to return them to other wild Furs in order to consolidate his alliance with them. Julian didn’t, after all, know that at least one group of wild Furs had become willing to throw in their lot with Jake.

  Or maybe—

  She gave it up. She didn’t have enough information. She felt physically exhausted. Most important of all, she couldn’t think like Julian. She wasn’t Jake, able to anticipate and plan from somebody else’s sickening viewpoint.

  Alex was profoundly glad that she genuinely did not know vhere Jake was. Somehow they must have all escaped before Julian arrived at the river. When Julian found out that Jake was not at the end-point hospital cave, he was probably going to torture Alex for anything she did know. She shuddered.

  Under torture, she knew, she would tell him about Karim and Lucy, about the biomass and the Vine it could grow, anything else to stop the pain. She wasn’t that strong. But she couldn’t tell Julian vhere Jake and Karim and the others had gone, because she honestly had no idea.

  Clutching that thin comfort, she fell asleep in the jolting vehicle, surrounded by keening alien terror.

  38

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  The rover ran out of power somewhere short of the biomass site. With power went the lights. Karim looked up at the moonless sky, rapidly clouding over, and spat, “Ebn sharmoota!”

  “I’m not going to ask what that means,” Jon said wearily.

  Natalie, who’d been driving more cautiously along the riverbed than her headlong hurl of a few hours ago, said, “We’re only two miles from the site. I saw the display just before it went out.”

  “Then two miles it is,” Jon said. “Let’s go.”

  The three of them got out, carrying nothing except a powertorch set very low. The computer had been left behind when they fled Julian Martin; Karim doubted it was still there. Martin would have searched the area. They would have to manage without the computer. How?

  They trudged along the riverbed, slipping on the wet stones, until Natalie said, “This is silly. We can walk on the bank above just as well. If Commander Martin’s men are still there, they’re probably going to catch us either way.”

  Karim had been too tired to think of that himself. “Pick up a large rock first, each of you,” he said. Gratefully he followed Natalie and Jon up the bank, carrying big rock. Walking was easier here, even though every so often one of them had to slide down the bank to check that they hadn’t passed the site of their hidden camp.

  By the time they reached the site, it had started to rain. Karim thought he couldn’t get more soaked than he’d been from Natalie’s wild drive in the riverbed, but he was wrong. Cold steady drizzle made his teeth chatter. He kept trudging on, flanked by Natalie and by Jon, uncharacteristically silent.

  “I think this is where the camp was,” Natalie said.

  Jon descended the bank, climbing back up a moment later. “Everything’s gone, including the computer. Natalie, Julian Martin’s techs can access the deebees—”

  “No,” Natalie said. “I threw the computer into a pool before we left. They won’t get anything out of that ruin.”

  “Good,” Karim said. “Let’s find the biomass hole.”

  They struck out away from the river. Jon said once, also uncharacteristically, “I’m so hungry I could eat the biomass.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Natalie said.

  Karim wasn’t thinking about food. He dropped to his knees, searching with the powertorch for some sign of the exact place the Vine had grown. He couldn’t find anything. So he guessed. “Here. Start pounding.”

  They sat cross-legged by the site, the three of them hitting the ground repeatedly with their rocks. They weren’t nearly as many as the wild Furs had been, stamping their feet and hitting their spear butts on the ground. But the vein of biomass—or pseudopod, or whatever it was—had come closer to the surface since that first summoning. Maybe it was still there.

  Summoning. That was the right word. Sitting exhausted on the wet ground, hammering with a stone, Karim had a sudden vivid memory, so strong that for a blessed moment all else disappeared. He was with his laleh in his nursery in the medina, and she was reading him a wondrous tale of a genie summoned from a lamp. A boy was trapped alone in the dark and he found that if he rubbed an alien lamp …

  “Here it comes!” Jon said, all the old excitement back in his voice. “Over there! Oh my dear gods…”

  Karim shifted the powertorch. The Vine grew a few inches above the ground, along with its also-growing dome. Like nacre, Jon had said, or a coral reef. Nonliving protection.

  “I’ve been giving its behavior a lot of thought,” Jon burbled. “The playful refusal to communicate seriously before you gave it the death flowers, and its serious cooperation with us afterward. I think this thing might somehow divide its sentient functions in a way completely outside our conceptualization, with maybe memory residing in the biomass and what we might call interpretive and moral functions in the—”

  “Not now, Jon,” Natalie said. “Please.”

  Karim waited as long as he could. The Vine was about a foot high now, much shorter than it had been during the previous communication. But Karim had no time.

  He traced on the ground with the most pointed part of his rock, hoping the biomass could “read” the vibrations. It was a simple enough picture. One circle, one line, a lot of dots. Over and over he traced it, as the Vine continued to grow.

  Please, Karim prayed silently to the Allah he didn’t believe in, please let it understand. And be willing to let us have them …

  Aladdin with his lamp. Three wishes…

  Jon said, “Tell me again.”

  “Spores,” Karim said. “These dots are supposed to represent the spores surrounding Vine planets.” The circle was the planet. “The spores are apparently delivered upstairs by some sort of extruded-cable space elevator.” The line, extending outward from the circle. “The spores float in a dormant state around the planet in dense clouds. When a ship enters the cloud, they apparently activate almost instantly and just dissolve any metal that hasn’t been prepared against them. They metabolize metal for their biological processes. It’s a shield, a world-spanning shield.”

  “But if this biomass here does give us these spores—”

  “Be quiet, Jon,” Natalie said, “for once!”

  Jon subsided. Karim went on tracing on the barren ground. Surely the biomass and Vine knew it was barren, knew their ancient enemy had been through here with their annihilating devastation? Surely the alien thing knew that the Furs were enemies of humans, too? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. But—

  Karim pushed the “but” awa
y. He couldn’t afford it just now. He went on tracing. Circle, line, many dots…

  “Let me take over a while,” Natalie said kindly.

  “No, I—”

  “Look!” Jon said. “Look at the Vine!”

  Three feet tall now, it was growing a deformed lump on the ground at its base. Jon shone the powertorch directly on the lump. It grew larger. Brown, slimy—as was everything associated with the Vines—it shimmered under the artificial light.

  “Is it alive?” Natalie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jon said. “I… now look!”

  The lump stopped growing. Simultaneously, Vine and dome began to dissolve. In a few minutes nothing remained except a slickness on the wet soil, which slowly sank underground, and the slimy brown lump.

  Gingerly Karim touched it. What if it were another genetically engineered infection, this time one that would wipe out humans as well as Furs? It wasn’t as if either species was any use to the biomass. But, no, the Vine/biomass didn’t kill. Long ago, George Fox had speculated that the entire idea of killing was alien to a species that was essentially one large organism obtaining energy from something akin to photosynthesis. You didn’t kill when everything on your entire world was you. It just wasn’t in the genes.

  Natalie said uncertainly, “I think it’s a sac. A container of some sort. The spores might be inside.”

  “We have to test it,” said Jon, the scientist.

  “Not here. Under the overhang,” Karim said. Now that they had the precious weapon—if it was a weapon—he cared again about possible detection by Julian Martin or by Furs. Now that they had a chance. Maybe.

  A last chance. Because Karim doubted the Vines would emerge again from the underground biomass, no matter how hard anyone knocked. Partly because the biomass itself, two miles down, was safe no matter who won the warring above. Partly because the biomass had now given humans the only two weapons the Vines had, to Karim’s knowledge, ever developed against the Furs.