Crucible

  “But if—”

  “Enough, Jon,” Karim said, and Jon subsided.

  River Cloud said no more. Karim found himself revising his opinion of the Cheyenne. However ludicrous and romantic their culture in a star-faring age, they had survived in greater numbers than had Mira City. The Cheyenne, unlike Jake and Karim and presumably Alex, were fed and housed and informed about their enemies.

  And Karim sensed in them, bone-tipped spears and all, a stony relentlessness, an implacability, that might in the long run be far more dangerous to Julian Martin than Karim’s own rage, than Jake’s shifting expediencies, even than the space Furs’ desperate bid to take over Greentrees.

  One of the other two braves returned in the morning, conferred with River Cloud, and disappeared again.

  “Julian Martin is hiding in the Isfahan Mountains, along the Black River,” River Cloud said to Karim. “Those are our names. I don’t know what you call them.”

  Karim wondered what River Cloud would say if he knew that “Isfahan” had been the name of an ancient Arabic city. What Arab-turned-Cheyenne two generations ago had named it?

  “Martin has constructed a lodge out of a large military shuttle,” River Cloud continued. “It is heavily defended.”

  “Take us there,” Karim said.

  River Cloud studied him. “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because you have some plan that you have not told us. We do not ally without trust.”

  Karim locked gazes with the blond brave. River Cloud was taller than he by two or three inches. They were probably the same age, although Karim had been born fifty years earlier. He felt every one of those five, decades now.

  What would Jake do?

  Oddly enough, it was not Jake’s but Lucy’s face that rose in front of him. Lucy, idealistic always, who had once left Jake for Karim because Jake had lied and cheated. Which was what Jake would also do now, if he were making this decision.

  But Karim was not Jake.

  “Yes,” Karim said steadily, “we have a plan. And I will trust you with it. Did your grandfather ever teach you what a spore is?”

  43

  TERRAN SHUTTLE BUNKER

  Two more days passed. Alex and the female Furs were fed and watered, although only Alex ate. Once each day a Terran soldier threw a pail of some sort of slop over the human and alien shit deposited in one corner, and it all dissolved, eaten by genemod bacteria with built-in terminator genes. The smell did not noticeably improve.

  Alex would have gone on trying to communicate with Cora and Miranda, if only for something to do, but the Furs seemed to have lost interest. They made no response to anything Alex drew, pantomimed, or said. Perhaps Grandmother Fur had told them to ignore Alex. Or maybe the females were just getting too weak to bother. How long could they go without eating at all? Already they all looked scrawnier under their thick, dirty pelts.

  Alex tore and twisted her blanket into a crude wrap. When that was finished, she had nothing to do. She slept as much as possible, lying beside the door with her nose turned away from the Furs.

  On the third day, the door opened and a Terran soldier in full battle gear tanglefoamed the Furs.

  Alex tried to force her way between him and the door. With a glance of amusement behind his clear helmet, he backhanded her and she crashed to the floor. Efficientiy he dragged the five bound female Furs from the room and slammed the door.

  Four female Furs.

  When her vision cleared from her hard fall, Alex saw that Grandmother had been tanglefoamed but not taken away. The old alien roared and wriggled against her bonds. When she found she couldn’t budge them, the roaring changed to the high keening, one bound foot trying vainly to hop against the floor.

  Alex hovered nearby. She couldn’t touch the tanglefoam or she would be caught in it, too. Before she could think of anything to ease the alien’s distress, the Terran soldier returned, seized Alex’s arm, and dragged her from the room.

  “Where are you taking the Furs? What are you going to do with the old one? Let me go, you—”

  The Terran soldier ignored her, opening the door of the second cell and thrusting her through it. Julian Martin waited inside.

  Fear stilled Alex. This tiny room was where Julian had tortured her before. But this time there was no chair, and Julian held no weapon. His nostrils flared.

  “You stink of them, Alex.”

  “Where … where are you taking them?”

  “To be ’wed in another key,’” he said, and she recognized the mockery of Duncan’s voice. Then he said in his own, “I wanted to say good-bye.”

  Good-bye? Again the fear. To quell it, she concentrated on one object, using it to push all emotion out of her mind. Julian’s ring, green gem on a gold band. “Who gave you that ring?” “My mother…”

  He said, “I’ll be gone for a few days, until I bring Jake back here. I wanted to say good-bye to you.”

  A sense of unreality swept over Alex, so strong that for just a moment the room blurred. Julian meant it. He had tortured her, tried to kill her, imprisoned her, and probably meant to do all these things again. Now he wanted to say goodbye to her before a few days’ trip, like any lover leaving to check a research station. And yet he was not insane, not in any sense that Alex understood the word. His brilliant green eyes, constantly alert because he’d lived with treachery so long that he could never be careless, regarded her keenly. He saw everything, and interpreted it accurately.

  “You think it’s strange that I want to say good-bye. But, Alex, this is a dangerous universe. I thought I’d taught you that much, at least. Anything could happen, and I might not return. Is it so odd that I’d want to say good-bye to someone I loved, the first person to introduce me to this gorgeous planet?” She said nothing.

  “Because it is gorgeous, you know. You never saw Terra, or you’d realize how breathtaking Greentrees is. ’Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

  “Don’t!”

  He smiled. “All right. My sensitive plant. Do you remember when I told you that the highest morality is to protect lives, to avoid having to fight at all? I’m doing that now. Only a few humans will die—as only relatively few have died so far—so that the rest can live in the peace and prosperity I can bring to Greentrees. And I will, Alex. I didn’t think I could love a place the way I love this planet, not ever again.”

  His green eyes had softened. Alex stared dumbly. He meant it.

  Julian moved toward her. She flinched, but he seemed to ignore that. His lips brushed her cheek, then he turned and left.

  A moment later the same Terran soldier tossed her back with Grandmother Fur.

  Hours later, the shuttle shuddered. Alex looked up from the water bowl she held to Grandmother’s mouth, carefully avoiding contact with the tanglefoam. Was the shuttle lifting off? Impossible, half buried in the hillside! What was happening?

  The walls started to dissolve.

  They thinned, wobbled, grew holes. Now Alex could hear shrieking, an eardrum-stabbing whoop like nothing on Greentrees. Through a hole in the dissolving wall—how could the shuttle be dissolving?—she saw the Terran soldier who had shoved her around. He held a weapon of some sort that had just sagged forward like a limp penis. More whooping, and a stone-tipped spear pierced the soldier, not dressed in battle gear, through the heart.

  Alex ran forward, stopped. She had no idea what was happening or what she should do. More wall dissolved, and her cell was open. So was nearly the entire shuttle. Six Terran soldiers, caught inside and without armor, lay dead on the now-dirt floor, arrows or spears in their bodies.

  Grandmother Fur began keening.

  A Cheyenne brave emerged from a clump of trees and ran to her, faster and more graceful than she would have thought possible. “Where are the other Terrans?” he said, not even winded.

  Alex could only shake her head.

  “Julian Martin?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  The bra
ve spied Grandmother Fur and drew another arrow from his quiver.

  “No, please, she’s just an old female! Julian took the other Furs but left her because she’s too old to breed! And she’s tied in tanglefoam!”

  The brave sheathed his arrow. “Where did he take the female enemy?”

  “I don’t know. He only said he’d be gone a few days. No wait, I think he—who are you? What did you do here?”

  The brave sped off.

  Alex’s knees gave way and she sunk to the ground. Nothing made any sense. A moment later she saw, beside the body of a dead Terran, a pile of pinkish goo, rapidly sinking into the soil. Hastily Alex smeared her hands with it before it all disappeared. The goo had been in a metal spray wand, now dissolved, on the soldier’s belt, now also dissolved. It was the only antidote for tanglefoam. She wiped her hands on Grandmother and freed her.

  The two of them waited, bewildered, for whatever came next.

  Two figures, much less graceful than the Cheyenne brave, jogged into view.

  “Karim!” Alex ran forward and embraced him, then Jon McBain. “How did you… who… Jake…”

  “We’ll tell you everything,” Jon said breathlessly. “Are you all right? What did—”

  Karim demanded, “Where’s Julian Martin?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think he’s gone after Jake. I didn’t tell him where Jake is because I don’t know, but I couldn’t help … he also took four Fur females of breeding age and left her—” Alex looked around, but Grandmother was gone.

  Karim grabbed her hand. “We’ve got to get to Martin before he finds Jake. I can stop Martin now, Alex. I’ve got the spores that—”

  “The what? Where’s Jake?”

  “Not now. Run!”

  He pulled her along. Parked at least a quarter mile away was a rover. Four Cheyenne braves waited quietly alongside.

  “We had to leave it here, way upwind,” Jon panted, out of breath. This explained nothing. “Get in!” He scrambled into the driver’s seat.

  Karim said to one of the braves, “You ride, too. It will be faster.”

  The brave, who wore blond braids, said coldly, “Cheyenne do not need white men’s devices.”

  “You’ll slow us down!”

  He didn’t even answer. Three Cheyenne melted into the trees. The blond brave said contemptuously, “Martin’s tracks are clear. He’s driving some very large machine. Follow me.” He loped off.

  “Supercilious bastard,” Jon said cheerfully. “That was River Cloud. Come on, Alex, we have a long way to go and a lot to tell.”

  She got in. Suddenly Grandmother Fur limped behind the rover. “Stop, Jon! Wait a minute!”

  Jon stopped, goggling at the creature. Grandmother gazed fearfully at Alex— to Alex, anyway, it looked like fear. And why not? If the Cheyenne scorned rovers, they at least knew what they were disdaining. To a wild Fur, the rover must be a terrifying mystery. But Grandmother wanted to follow her daughters. Her sheer bravery was dazzling. Alex opened the rover door.

  “God, no, Alex, the Cheyenne will have a fit!” Jon said.

  “Let them,” Alex answered, and Grandmother stumbled in.

  Julian was easy to follow; they wouldn’t even have needed the blond brave to lead. Alex suspected that Julian was driving the same truck that had brought her and the Furs to the shuttle bunker. It left a wide trail of broken brush and broken tree branches. Even after the forest gave way to plain, the truck’s treads were visible on the purple groundcover, which hadn’t had time to spring back. On the plain, Alex felt exposed, but the brave ahead never faltered in his steady, tireless lope. Jon drove steadily a few hundred yards behind, while Karim, in the other front seat, shouted over his shoulder to Alex.

  He told her about the spores.

  She heard the triumph in his young voice—she, after all, had ridiculed his biomass hopes—but was too dazed to respond. There was too much to take in.

  Julian had killed the male wild Furs, before they had even a chance of becoming infected.

  Siddalee Brown had sewn an infrasonic tracer into Alex’s Threadmore, and Julian had made Siddalee confess. Made her … oh God, the tiny metal thing in Julian’s hand and the horrifying pain … Siddalee …

  Natalie, warned by Siddalee just before her capture, had gotten Jake and the others away before Julian arrived at the river campsite.

  Karim had contacted the Vine a second time.

  The Vine had actually produced a… a spore that could … the same as the shield around Vine planets … it apparently never decayed … never…

  She whispered, “All metal on Greentrees?”

  Somehow Karim heard her. “Eventually. Not right away.”

  “But Karim—”

  “Shhhh! River Cloud’s doubling back!”

  The brave loped to the rover, saw Grandmother Fur, and stopped. His mouth curved in anger, the first emotion Alex had seen from any Cheyenne. Grandmother bared her teeth and her three eyes glittered.

  River Cloud said, “The desecration lies just ahead.” It took Alex a moment to realize he meant the kill-clean zone. “Stay hidden here until we return.”

  Karim said, “We haven’t got the time! If Martin gets to Jake Holman before we do—”

  “He’s not heading toward Jake Holman. We veered away from the river long ago. Martin’s truck is driving toward the Fur shuttle in the mountains.”

  Jon cried, “He’s going straight to the space Furs! But how can he expect to take them on?”

  Alex thought rapidly. In a startling, vivid moment she saw suddenly what Julian was going to do: all of it, the whole plan, laid out before her as clear and detailed as a bright holo image. She could enter the holo as if it were threedimensional, could walk around in it, could inspect every glowing aspect. At last, after all Julian’s exhortations, she had begun to think like him.

  It sickened her.

  She said slowly, “He’s going to use the Crucible”

  “What?” Karim said.

  “He’s going to put out the four wild Fur females as bait. He doesn’t know where the Fur shuttle is, hasn’t dared expose himself enough to look for it. When the space Furs move the shuttle to get the females, he’s going to send an order up to the Crucible. She’s probably somewhere on this side of the planet in a low orbit while the Fur ship is on the other side. Julian waited for that configuration. The Crucible will blast the entire mountain with an alpha beam or some equivalent.”

  Jon said, “But if he does that, the mother ship will destroy the Crucible. They have more advanced weapons and are magnitudes faster! The Fur ship has McAndrew Drive!”

  “Julian knows that,” Alex said. She remembered Julian at that first party for him in the Mausoleum, explaining how Terra had destroyed most of her population: “When ninety percent of your ethnic group is predicted to perish anyway, you don’t mind releasing pathogens that will kill a third of your people but also a third of the enemy.”

  Jon went on arguing. “But the soldiers on the Crucible know that they’d die. They wouldn’t follow the order!”

  Karim, born Terran and not Greenie, said grimly, “Yes, they would.”

  Jon said, “Then I don’t see how we—”

  Karim interrupted him. “We can release the spores as soon as possible onto Julian’s truck. That’ll take it all out—comlink to the Crucible, weapons, truck, everything. The Cheyenne can get close enough upwind to scatter the spores—”

  “Maybe,” Jon said doubtfully, “but I doubt it. Martin has probably got sophisticated thermal-signature detectors. I don’t think anything human can get closer to him than maybe five miles, and that’s nowhere near close enough to count reliably on wind dispersal. Anyway, if the Crucible does take out the whole mountain, we’d go with it.”

  Anything human.

  Alex had thought she’d felt sick before, when she understood Julian’s plan. It was nothing to what she felt now. She looked at Grandmother Fur.

  No. She couldn’t do it

>   She couldn’t see any other choice.

  And she couldn’t give Grandmother Fur a choice. If she did, even if Alex could somehow communicate enough in the short time left—the old alien might refuse. And then they all would die, killed by Julian Martin seeking power, or killed by the space Furs seeking uncontaminated real estate.

  Grandmother Fur, unreadable, looked at Alex. Alex got out of the rover and gestured. The alien followed her, looking around. For her daughters, most likely, and her granddaughter.

  Flora. Dora. Cora. Miranda.

  O brave new world that has such people in it.

  Hating herself, fighting down the bile rising in her throat, Alex said to Karim, “Give me the spore sac.”

  44

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  River Cloud reluctantly agreed to guide the old female wild Fur. The space Fur shuttle, he told Karim, was in a mountain meadow several miles above Jon McBain’s research station along the river. The Cheyenne had known its location two days after it landed. That was why they’d captured the station; it made a convenient base to keep watch on the shuttle-fortress. The inexplicable arrival of Lucy and Karim had startled the Cheyenne but not upset them: just two more crazy whites.

  Karim watched Alex with the female Fur. The two sat on the ground in a small clearing. Late afternoon light slanted through the branches of the tall purple trees. Greentrees’ night scent, which Karim had so longed for on the hellish Vine world, came to him on the breeze, still faint. Tiny white night flowers began to open.

  Alex bent her head over the metal object, the second, she was using for her demonstration to the old Fur.

  Karim wished savagely for a computer. If he could figure likely orbits for the Crucible and for the Fur McAndrew Drive ship, likely weapon trajectories … as it was, he was reduced to guessing that Martin would wait until dark to attack. Hardly a technologically sophisticated guess.

  Better get accustomed to it.

  Alex rose and walked toward him. At the sight of her face, Karim looked away. He had seen Jake in moral anguish. Dr. Shipley, Lucy. He had never seen anyone look as terrible as Alex at this moment.

  “She’s ready.”