Crucible

  “Jake wants to see you,” Lucy said.

  It was nightfall again. A brisk wind blew, dissolving things. The Cheyenne women, amazingly efficient, had erected an entire tented village on the empty plain just before the kill-clean zone ended and the forest began. Fires burned, children played, food cooked, braves stood watch. The spores would make very little difference to the Cheyenne. They already functioned in the Stone Age.

  That was not what Alex had wanted for Mira City.

  She walked toward the trees. She still had not slept. Exhaustion hung over her like a smell—like the elephants, like the wild Furs. But rest would not come. Bloodshot in the eyes and wobbly in the knees, she stumbled through the forest to the second camp set up for Jake, sheltered a little from the dust.

  Julian Martin stood by the fire.

  His hands were bound behind his back and a strip of animal hide around his ankles let him walk but not run or kick. Gray Bird stood on one side of him, River Cloud on the other. A long jagged wound ran from one shoulder down Julian’s arm, bloodying his black uniform. But he stood easily, arrogantly, and smiled when he saw her.

  “Hello, Alex.”

  Jake sat wrapped in hides and propped against a tree by the fire, Karim and Jon standing beside him. For once, Jon stayed quiet. Karim looked at Alex’s face and then away.

  “Alex,” Jake said, “there is something we have to decide. With you. Julian is the last of the Terrans left alive. The Cheyenne … Julian is the last Ashraf is dead. He—”

  “How do you know Ashraf is dead?” Alex got the words out somehow.

  Julian said, “I told them so.”

  Jake continued, “You’re in charge on Greentrees now. In charge of what’s left of Mira City’s population, anyway, which I suspect is actually quite a lot, scattered around. You can decide to keep Julian in custody until we build a judicial system again, but I don’t think that’s wise. He will always be dangerous.” Jake paused, swallowed with difficulty—Alex, her vision preternaturally and painfully clear, saw his Adam’s apple move in his withered throat—and said, ’The Cheyenne want him.”

  It took a moment for the words to register.

  River Cloud said, “He is ours. He armed the wild Furs against us, he and the woman Nan Frayne. The Cheyenne nation agrees to help you learn to survive in harmony with the Great Spirit and from His bounty, but only if you give us this man. He is ours.”

  Alex looked at Julian. He smiled easily at her.

  He smiled.

  “What… what will you do to him?”

  Jake said quickly, “They won’t tell you that.”

  Because Jake had instructed them not to. What else was part of this unholy bargain? Survival skills in exchange for—

  Torture. That’s what it would come to. The old Terran Cheyenne had tortured their prisoners to death.

  She saw Lau-Wah Mah’s body. Siddalee Brown’s. Felt again the small silver weapon in Julian’s hand in the tiny cell in his shuttle.

  She said to River Cloud, “You can have him only if you execute him right now, here, in front of me. Now.”

  River Cloud hesitated.

  “That’s the only way,” Alex said. “I’m sorry, River Cloud, but I can’t. I can’t.”

  “He is ours,” River Cloud repeated.

  No, he’s not, she wanted to say. No more yours than Mira City’s, than Yat-Shing Wong’s, than Siddalee Brown’s, than Grandmother Fur’s. Than all the people he killed or caused to be killed. And Julian was hers, too, because she had believed in him and helped him, as had Jake and Ashraf and so many more. They hadn’t known. They hadn’t seen far enough ahead. None of them had.

  “ ‘Ifyou can look into the seeds of time,

  And say which grain will grow and which will not,

  Speak then to me…”’

  But she could not agree to torture. She simply could not, and live herself.

  “No,” she told River Cloud.

  He picked up his spear and walked off. Gray Bird followed.

  “Wait,” Alex said. “Wait—”

  A silent movement from Jake, a smell of burning flesh, and Julian’s tall body crumpled to the ground.

  Jake held a laser gun in his trembling, wrinkled hand. A plastic box, in which it had been preserved, lay open on his lap. As Alex stared, the gun began to dissolve.

  “He wanted to die,” Jake said to Alex. “He wanted it. River Cloud, stay a minute, listen to me—”

  Alex didn’t listen. She knelt beside Julian. He had fallen backward and lay face up on the forest floor. The brilliant green eyes were open. A half smile still remained on his face; Jake had been right. Julian had wanted to die. “You’re named after Alexander the Great,” she heard his teasing voice say, “who wept because he had no worlds left to conquer.” “There are always worlds to conquer,” Alex had replied, but not for Julian. Not without his army, his ship, his weapons, his power.

  If Alex had had a gun, she realized, she would have shot him herself. From compassion, from revenge, from justice, from expedience—she could no longer tell her reasons apart.

  Alex reached to close Julian’s eyes, stopped. She couldn’t touch him. Her gaze, suddenly blurred, snagged on the green stone on the ground beside his hand. The metal band must have dissolved. “Who gave you that ring?” “My mother…”

  She stood and walked away from the body. Behind her, Jake began to negotiate with the Cheyenne. She heard the telltale note in his voice, as she had so many times before: bargaining, manipulating, persuading, compromising. Necessary work, and now more than ever before in Greentrees’ brief history. Without the Cheyenne skills, mass survival on even this fertile and lush planet would not be easy.

  Although Alex had no doubt now that the remnant of Mira City would survive, with or without the Cheyenne. Mira had survived wild Furs and space Furs and Vines and being caught in the crossfire of an alien war. They had even survived Julian Martin, which had been harder than the various aliens. There was nothing in the universe, Alex had learned, as dangerous to humans as they were to each other. Jake was deftly negotiating that danger right now. But Alex didn’t listen.

  She walked to the bustling nomadic village, lay down beside the nearest fire, and slept.

  46

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  The Cheyenne left as abruptly as they had come, loading up the malodorous “elephants” and trekking into a light blowing rain that, Karim was sure, was spreading spores even faster than anticipated. River Cloud spoke only once to Karim.

  “Tell Alex Cutler, when she wakes, that she was wrong. We do not torture our prisoners. Not everything from Terran Cheyenne was worth keeping.”

  “River Cloud, won’t you stay with us a little longer? We need to learn so much…”

  “Gray Bird and his wife will stay behind to teach you.” River Cloud pointed. “Look”

  Kueilan was helping a Cheyenne girl take down a tent. They were trying to keep the inside dry, difficult in the drizzly wind. Kueilan wore her own Greenie boots with a fringed dress of soft tanned leather embroidered with tiny stones. The girl, barely past puberty, wore moccasins and a Threadmore with its fasteners dissolved, cinched around her waist with a strip of rawhide. Around her neck on a leather string hung a glossy plastic Chinese character that, Karim knew, meant “hope.”

  River Cloud said dryly, “Gray Bird and his wife have no children.” He strode away.

  When Kueilan had finished with the tent, Karim said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She flushed shghtly. “Here?”

  “No.” He led her into the trees, stopping under one that provided shelter and privacy. Kueilan’s hair, unbound, fell glossy and fresh-smelling to her shoulders. Her black eyes tilted upward at the corners, their expression, Karim thought, as gentle as a kitten’s.

  “Well?” she said.

  He wasn’t sure how to begin. “Lucy… Lucy and I…”

  “Where is Lucy?”

  “With Jake.” The words came then. “She?
??s always been with Jake. In her mind, I mean. She only came into space with me because they’d had some sort of quarrel, I don’t know what. But it’s Jake she—”

  Kueilan said, shocked, “Mr. Holman’s an old old man!”

  “I know.” Karim ran his hand through his hair. Unlike Kueilan’s, it was filthy. “But to Lucy and me… We knew him so well before, Kueilan. When he was still young. He’s an extraordinary person. Lucy—” as he spoke the words, Karim suddenly realized how true they were “—Lucy needs the extraordinary. Needs it. Nothing else matters to her, really.”

  “Not even you?”

  “No.”

  Kueilan’s eyes searched his. She said, “Yat-Shing Wong’s my cousin.”

  He was disoriented. “What?”

  “Yat-Shing Wong, a Hope of Heaven dissident. He was my cousin. Karim, what kind of Mira City are you and Alex and Mr. Holman going to rebuild?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What does this have to do with—”

  “It has everything to do with it,” she said, and all at once Karim saw that his gentle kitten had become a tiger. Not that Kueilan, Greentrees born, would recognize a tiger.

  “We Chinese could hope to become techs, like me, in the old Mira City. But usually no more than that, because opportunity was so tied to shareholding in

  Mira Corp, which in turn was tied to First Landing wealth. Are you going to construct that sort of colony again?”

  Karim stared at her. “Kueilan, I’m a physicist, not a—”

  “You’re a First Lander’s nephew, an Arab of the house of ibn Saud. You never thought about this because you were already at the top of the social order.”

  “I never thought about this because I haven’t been on-planet! For more than twice your entire lifetime I’ve been in space!”

  She smiled, her small red mouth forming a close-lipped O, and Karim saw how she differed from Lucy. Kueilan had humor, and he didn’t need to push every idealistic principle until it broke. Or every person.

  Jake, even at his age, knew how to push back.

  Kueilan said, “Yes, you were out in space. But Greentrees will need to be different now, Karim. Are you going to help Alex make it different?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  She laughed. “Which means you don’t really care. That’s all right. That’s enough. As long as you won’t be fighting for the old order.” She reached up and kissed him.

  Jake sat on a pile of animal-hide rugs in the one tent the Cheyenne had left behind, bleakly regarding its sapling supports. The tent was surprisingly snug, and roomier than he’d thought possible from the outside. But it was a tent, a primitive design made with primitive technology, and the pemmican Lucy had softened in stream water for him was primitive, too.

  Jake had once commanded a starship.

  Alex stirred in her sleep. She smelled vile, too, although that was only temporary. Her exhausted sleep, which had already lasted fourteen hours, was profound and, Jake hoped, dreamless. Karim, Jon McBain, and Natalie had buried

  Julian Martin while Alex slept; she had at least been spared that. Jake had told them to keep the grave unmarked and its location to themselves.

  “You have to eat, Jake,” Lucy said.

  “It smells bad.”

  “It’s nourishment. You have to bolster your strength. Mira City needs you.”

  She spoke, Jake saw, with complete conviction. Lucy genuinely believed that Mira City—which no longer even existed—needed a drooling old man who fell asleep at unpredictable intervals.

  “Nobody but you could have negotiated River Cloud into promising us as much help as he did. Nobody. You’re amazing.”

  Jake snorted. But the flattery was very pleasant.

  Pleasant enough to put up with the inevitable friction between Alex and Lucy? Alex, his de-facto daughter, always bullied Jake about his health. And now Lucy, for whom no relationship label could sum up their convoluted joint history, was going to do the same thing.

  “If we take good enough care of you,” Lucy said, “you can direct the rebuilding of Mira City.”

  “Can I come in?” said Jon McBain, drawing aside the tent flap and coming in. “I want to show you and Alex something!”

  “Alex is still asleep,” Lucy said reprovingly. “Keep your voice lower.”

  “Show to you, then, Jake,” McBain said excitedly. He irritated Jake. Always excited, always talking, the microbiologist seemed to lack all sense of social awareness. Whatever he was interested in, he assumed everyone else was interested in, too. Or should be.

  “This is just a rough sketch, of course,” McBain said, and held out a piece of tree.

  Bark. It was a flattened roll of peeled tree bark, with a drawing on it in charcoal. Jon McBain had once designed energy systems on holo-computers.

  “See, it uses ceramics, not metal. Structural ceramics, which I’m confident we can produce from borides and silicides, will be strong enough for a hydraulic system. Once we have this basic engine— and this is just the simplest prototype, of course—there’s no reason we can’t use it to manufacture plant-based plastics, and then use the plastics to—”

  He talked on while Jake nibbled on the pemmican. Despite himself, he was impressed. He was no scientist, but the engine looked feasible. And Mira City had physicists like Karim, had other scientists… Jake had sent Natalie and Ben, now well enough to travel, west to the closest evacuation end point outside the kill-clean zone. The prevailing winds blew east. If Natalie and Ben could find a functioning comlink before the spores became widely dispersed, they would make an all-frequency broadcast. Its dual message would be simple: Come home because the war is over. And bury everything metal in sealed plastic containers.

  “—resistant to oxidation and decomposition, and we can approach the brittleness problem by—”

  Yes, this ceramic technology might work. “You can direct the rebuidiing of Mira City,” Lucy had said, conveniently leaving out Alex. But perhaps Mira could be rebuilt. Differently, yes: new technology, new priorities, and, inevitably, new social structures. Not that any of that would eliminate future strife, future folly, future failures. Jake was too old and too experienced to believe that.

  Still, the ceramic engine looked promising.

  The same spores that made the ceramic technology necessary now protected Greentrees from any more invaders, Fur or human.

  The Cheyenne tent kept out the rain very well.

  “—high-strain-rate superplastic ceramic, not right away, of course, but after the—”

  Jake bit into the pemmican. It wasn’t bad.

  EPILOGUE: MIRA CITY

  Alex stood on the platform erected at one end of the park and surveyed the crowd gathered to hear the fifty-third anniversary speeches.

  It was a satisfyingly large crowd, more people than she’d expected. Farmers had come in from the countryside, considerately leaving their elephants in a stockyard pen downwind. Several ceramics workers still wore their tough Threadmores, blackened with foundry soot and fastened with the new ceramic buttons from Chu Corporation. The New Quakers, as always, clustered together at one side. Several Arab women sat among them. Now that the medina was gone, the Quaker-sponsored course at the Exchange Center in sewing with bone needles had proved surprisingly popular with the older Arab women.

  Behind her on the platform Jake called, “Remember to yell, Alex. No mike.”

  “Don’t yell like that,” Lucy said severely. “You already sound hoarse!”

  Alex ignored them both. She scanned the crowd to get a rough count. Maybe as many as three thousand. Of course, the herders couldn’t leave their glennings nor the breeders their frabbits, on which so much depended. Clothing, meat, sundries like the bone needles. And runners, the young people who in the absence of trams or horses carried goods among the nodes of this looser, more far-flung Mira City, were mostly in the field. But other industries had declared the day a holiday and closed entirely. The Scientists’ League was there, and the Carpe
nters’ Guild, and the flourishing Zhou Lighting Company, which had scored such an early success with oil lamps that it had cornered the market.

  A breeze blew cooking smells to the platform. The communal kitchen had been working for days to prepare this feast. Every ceramic pot on every ceramic stove simmered with spicy delicacies. Alex’s mouth watered.

  The band struck up Greentrees’ newly adopted anthem, “We’re Still Here.” Alex knew all the words, which were ungainly and moving, but she couldn’t distinguish them over the instruments. Wood flutes, a ceramic horn of some type, a few guitars, and a drum. Several people stood; more didn’t.

  A ripple ran over the crowd and people spun around and laughed. Two messages were coming in simultaneously. Against the clear eastern sky, green smoke puffs—the coloring was another Zhou Company success—rose. Alex, like everyone else over the age of four, read the green symbols easily. They came from the upriver Hamoud Fish Farms.

  (fish) (unable) (ship) (greetings) (as a result of the foregoing) (Hamoud staff) (ship) (greetings) (Mira City)

  What made it funny was the other message, flashing from tower to tower via Jon McBain’s polished glass-and-ceramic mirrors all the way from the coastal ichthyologist research station:

  (fish) (Mira Ichythyologist Research Station) (ship) (greetings) (Mira City)

  Alex smiled. The joke was pretty lame, but laughter hadn’t been too plentiful in the last two and a half years. Too many people had died. But more had survived than she’d dared hope, those who had evacuated Mira when they were supposed to and then stayed hidden during the brief, terrible war with the space Furs. About half of Greentrees’ population had slowly staggered back from the places they’d fled to. More had chosen to move even farther away and build new frontier towns.

  At first there had been no housing for the returnees, no hospital for the sick, little food, and no metal to try to re-create the familiar. Everything had had to be rethought. They could not have done it at all in a harsher environment. But this was Greentrees: lush, generous, beautiful wherever humanity had not scarred her.

  So now Alex looked out at wooden structures with dovetailed joints; stone structures with that old Roman staple, the key arch; tents and lodges decorated with Chinese characters. This Mira City had none of the soaring grace and ecologically correct harmony she had once envisioned. This Mira City was eclectic, crude, makeshift, evolving, vital.