Crucible Read online

  No one on the platform reacted. And, Siddalee noted suddenly, Nan Frayne was no longer up there. Siddalee hadn’t heard or seen the woman follow her down the ramp, but nonetheless she was gone, as stealthy as the sweet-scented wind.

  On the other side of Mira City, Alexandra Cutler ran through the deserted streets toward the genetics labs.

  God, she was out of shape! Fear kept her moving until, winded, she was forced to stop and bend over for a moment, hands on her knees, a middle-aged woman who stayed lean but not fit. Or not fit enough for this anyway, although “this” should not be something anyone on Greentrees had to prepare for. “This” should not be happening.

  Please let it not be true.

  Her panting echoed in her ears, unnaturally loud. As soon as she could, she straightened and resumed running.

  Finally the lab buildings loomed ahead, windowless foamcast structures, many large enough to contain negative-pressure safe labs and plastic-roofed growing beds. A virgin grove of Greentrees’ tall narrow trees, their leaves purple from an analog of Terra’s photosynthetic rhodomicrobia, grew beside the labs.

  Although they stood at the edge of Mira City, just before the river swept abruptly west, to Alex the labs were the heart of the city. Here the native flora and fauna of Greentrees were genetically adapted to fit two not always compatible ends: preservation of the native ecology and use by humans who had come from a different planet. Without the labs, humans might have survived on Greentrees, but they would not have flourished. As the tray-o, the Technology Resource Allocation officer, Alex meted out the largest share, by far, of resources to the gene labs. Too large a share, some said. Let them. The labs were key.

  And someone had the arrogance, the stupidity, the sheer bad taste—to Alex, the three were nearly synonymous—to threaten the labs.

  The solemn, pretty Chinese girl, Star Chu, had warned Alex just minutes ago. “Alex … I’m afraid there might be trouble at the gene labs. Soon. Now. I can’t say more, but I think you should survey it. Take security with you.” And Star had turned away, disappearing fluidly into the crowd, before Alex could question her, could in fact do more than numbly register that Star herself looked like the embodiment of what she had delicately referred to as “trouble”: a hardworking, successful part owner of a Greentrees corporation who nonetheless wore fake Cheyenne tattoos on her cheek, used Blue Lion and fizzies, and wore discontent as blatantly as her red lipstick. Yet she’d warned Alex.

  Alex’s father had once told her that he thought the Arabs would cause eventual problems. “Over time the Arabs might find Greentrees a real culture shock. The contrast between the traditions they bring with them and the ways pioneer societies evolve could lead to real factionalism among them, even violence. Watch out especially for their youth, Alex.” But the Arabs had settied in seamlessly, developing a sort of semisecular semiassimilated Islam that satisfied everybody, and the Chinese youth had splintered, rebelled, and exploded. Go figure.

  The lab buildings looked quiet, an unlovely utilitarian series of connected foamcast cubes. Alex, who hadn’t taken the time to wait for security, approached cautiously. The front door of Building D stood crazily agape on half its hinges. Someone had lasered it.

  Alex could remember when no one on Greentrees locked buildings.

  She took her comlink from a pocket formed by her red-arid-green wrap, which she had tied in an elaborate, modest crisscross that didn’t impede movement. Guy Davenport, Mira’s security chief, answered immediately. “Alex here,” she panted. “I’m at the gene labs, the door’s been forced open, and there may be trouble.”

  “Don’t go in,” Guy said. “A detail will be there right away. Do you hear me, Alex, don’t go—” She clicked off and entered the building.

  The corridor was cool and shadowed, a sharp contrast to the sunlight outside. There was no lobby; this was a completely utilitarian structure. Alex walked past closed doors, some with Restricted signs. At the end of the corridor, the door to the animal labs stood open. Something crashed inside, and suddenly the air was thick with shrieking.

  She sprinted forward. “Stop it! What are you doing here! My God, you can’t— ” And stopped dead.

  Two groups of Chinese kids faced off across the room. Cages surrounded them, and half the noise came from a pair of lions, the only predator on Greentrees dangerous to humans. Tree dwelling, the lions had the long sleek bodies of cats but with tentacled forelegs and a powerful prehensile tail to wrap around branches. Like so much else on Greentrees, their skin was purplish blue. Alex knew that the geneticists were trying to modify the lions’ genome to make them less aggressive without disrupting Greentrees’ food chain. So far this had failed.

  The female of the experimental breeding pair screamed in her cage. The male stood in the middle of the floor, baring its teeth at the unarmed group of kids huddled against a side wall.

  “Get out of here, Alexandra Cutler,” one of the others said. That group stood beside the door Alex had just burst through, their leader armed with a laser gun he should not have been able to obtain.

  She forced herself to calm. “You’re Yat-Shing Wong, aren’t you?”

  “Wong Yat-Shing,” the boy sneered. “In Hope of Heaven, we’ve reclaimed true Chinese usage in our naming.”

  Hope of Heaven. Alex’s heart sank. Hope of Heaven was the dissident settlement established ten miles downriver from Mira City, and this was some sort of youth war between the Chinese of Hope of Heaven and the Chinese in Mira. Alex couldn’t imagine anything more stupid, or more dangerous. The lion growled softly.

  “Mr. Wong, you don’t want that animal to hurt anyone.”

  Wong only smiled.

  “Ms. Cutler, it’s coming closer!” a captive girl in a brief red wrap said, although the lion wasn’t. Alex considered her chances of seizing Wong’s gun and shooting the beast; not good.

  “Stay calm,” Alex called to the girl. “Yat-Shing, you don’t want to be charged with murder. I know you don’t.”

  There had never been a murder on Greentrees, not in fifty years.

  Wong snarled, “You don’t know anything about what we want in Hope of Heaven!”

  The lion gathered itself to leap.

  The girl in the red wrap screamed. The three others in her group tried to run toward the door, one of them tripping and sprawling facedown in front of the lion. Alex grabbed for Wong’s gun and was easily shoved away. As she fell, pictures of the scene registered on her numbed mind, each preternaturally hard edged and clear:

  The girl in the red wrap with her hands over her face, long slim hands with rings on each pinkie.

  The sprawled boy, raising his head from the floor as the lion soared over him toward the girl, his look befuddled as he glimpsed the underbelly of the attacker.

  The spear arcing through the air and catching the lion in midflight, so that it shivered on the air and then dropped short of the girl, pierced through the soft tissue of its right scent organ and into the brain.

  A spear?

  Alex rose slowly and turned her head. If she had expected anything at all, if she’d been able to think of anything, it would have been a Cheyenne brave. There were Cheyenne in Mira for the celebration. The Cheyenne, those southern romantics reviving a primitive lifestyle from an earlier planet, used spears. A Cheyenne might have—oh yes, this made sense—just wandered by and happened to hurl a spear at a deliberately loosed lion deep inside the genetics lab building—

  Framed in the doorway stood an alien Fur, seven feet high, balanced on its jumping tail, a second spear in its tentacled hand.

  The room went absolutely silent, even the sobbing rescued girl. Probably half the kids in this room didn’t even believe the Furs existed. No more native to Greentrees than were humans, their population was small and their history completely improbable. Almost no one in Mira had ever seen one. The primitive Furs lived far to the south, in the same subcontinent as their enemies the Cheyenne, countiess light-years from their space-faring cousins wh
o had sworn to destroy humanity.

  Alex scrambled to her feet and lunged a second time for Wong’s gun, before he could shoot the Fur. She was too late. Nan Frayne stood beside the Fur, the boy’s gun in her hand, his arms laced painfully behind his back to a thonged stick she held casually in her other hand.

  “Nan—”

  “I was with a security detail when they were comlinked,” the old woman said. “Old”—not the right word, no. Nan Frayne looked old as boulders looked old, weathered and strong and something not to get crushed by. “You need better security people, Alex.”

  And now Guy’s forces came puffing through the door, two men as middle-aged as Alex but much fatter, guns drawn, looking helpless.

  “Security’s fine,” Alex said crossly, which was stupid because clearly it wasn’t. Nan Frayne, the two times she’d met her before, made Alex feel like an idiot.

  “Could have fooled me,” Nan said. “Gang stomper?”

  Alex didn’t know what the words meant; Nan was First Landing and they all used Earth words that had slipped out of the language because there was no need for them. Alex didn’t answer. Nan said something in a low, growly language to the Fur, who answered her. The kids gaped at the alien. The security men began to yammer at Alex. Yat-Shing Wong, or Wong Yat-Shing, began, “If you think you—” and Nan gave a casual twitch of the stick holding him that made him yelp in pain. Through this babble Nan turned to Alex and spoke as if the rest of the din didn’t exist.

  “I was coming to see you anyway. Your mayor wants you. He just got word. There’s a ship approaching Greentrees.”

  Alex opened her mouth but no words came. No ship had approached Greentrees for thirty-nine years. There were only two possibilities whose ship it was. Finally she managed, “Is it—”

  “I don’t know if it’s Karim Mahjoub—or if it’s the enemy. You go find out. I’ve got better things to do.”

  A moment later Alex found herself holding the stick that tethered the furious Wong, and both Nan and the Fur had melted out the door.

  2

  MIRA CITY

  Jake had warned them. For thirty-nine years he’d warned them, and it had done very little good. Now he slumped in his wheelchair, his old bones aching and his mind struggling to stay awake, because they hadn’t listened to his warnings and the time had finally come to pay for that.

  Maybe.

  The hastily called meeting included the triumvirate, Jake, and the physicist in charge of Mira’s dwindling array of space sats, David Parker. Contain the information, Jake had said immediately, and for once Alex had actually listened to him.

  “The ship is coming in at a tiny fraction of c, and it’s just beyond Cap,” said Buder, and everybody shut up because that put a new spin on everything. Cap was the farthest-out planet in the star system; in Mira City, major landmarks were given nonsense-syllable names to avoid favoring any one of its three dominant cultures. So the planets were Mel, Jun, Greentrees, Par, and Cap. Cap was 2.6 new AUs from the sun, David said, while Jake tried to remember what a new AU was and failed.

  “So if it’s coming in that slow,” Alex said, “it isn’t using a McAndrew Drive? And it’s not Furs or Karim Mahjoub?”

  “No way to tell,” David answered. He was a thin, nervous, balding man with startling blue-green eyes, undoubtedly the legacy of a vanity genemod three or more generations ago on Earth. He was some sort of distant cousin to Alex, Jake remembered, but, then, three-quarters of the scientists on Greentrees belonged to the vast Cutler clan. As Parker spoke, he plucked at his left ear. “There’s no reason I can think of why either Karim or attacking Furs wouldn’t use the drive to come in, if they had it. If this ship keeps on the way it is, it won’t be here for eleven days. Our orbital probes are giving us plenty of warning.”

  Mayor Shanti said, “Then I don’t see how it could be Furs. An enemy wouldn’t do that.”

  Lau-Wah Mah said, “I don’t think Karim would, either.”

  The Cheyenne leader, whose name Jake had forgotten (he forgot too much these days), and who had been asked to the meeting only because he was in Mira City for the celebration, said nothing.

  In the general silence that followed Mah’s remark, Jake shifted his chair for a better view of the Chinese governor. Shifting the chair cost Jake effort and pain. Once the chair had been powered, but a few years ago the parts had worn out and Alex as tray-o had, rightly, not deemed powerchair replacement parts the best use of limited metal-factory resources. There was a limit to how many different things a pioneer society could manufacture. More important things than powerchairs had gone to the bottom of the list. Still, Jake missed his old chair.

  Lau-Wah Mah’s face gave nothing away. Did he know yet what had happened at the genetics lab? In his second year of his six-year term as governor, Mah was the third most important man in Mira, after his fellow triumvirates Mayor Shanti and Alex Cutler. Mah was a quiet, focused man with a smooth blank face like a peeled egg. So far he had let the other two, advised by Jake, make most of the decisions.

  Jake couldn’t remember when the triumvirate system had informally devolved to mean one Arab, one Anglo, and one Chinese, but he didn’t like it. This wasn’t the way he and Gail Cutler had designed the political system on Greentrees to work.

  Well, nothing had happened as designed. How could it, when they’d discovered sentient Furs living on Greentrees, and then it had turned out that the Furs weren’t native to Greentrees but imported, part of a vast biological experiment by another alien race at war with the real Furs. Mira City had been caught in the crossfire between these two technologically superior races. Jake and eight others had been kidnapped by the Furs to send them to the Vine planet to destroy the Vines’ defenses, but of course the Fur plan had failed because Karim Mahjoub—

  “Jake,” Alex said gently, and he realized he’d been doing it again, letting his mind wander back to the vigorous past. Ah, it was no fun being old. He forced himself to pay attention to the here and now.

  David Parker said, “We haven’t had any radio communication from the ship. But I agree with Lau-Wah—I can’t see why Karim would come in that slowly, when he can use the McAndrew Drive for rapid balanced deceleration much closer in. Why take the extra time?”

  The mayor said tentatively, “Maybe to investigate what he’s coming back to. After all, he’s been gone thirty-nine years.”

  They all contemplated this. Thirty-nine years, Jake thought. And for Karim, how long? A year, maybe. Maybe less, depending on how much time they’d spent under McAndrew Drive. Karim and Lucy would still be around thirty years old. Lucy, whom he’d once held in his arms, kissed, loved … Stay in the present.

  Alex said, “Caution could be the reason for Karim’s radio silence, too. Waiting until we contact him.”

  “No, no,” Jake said, suddenly glad to be paying attention. “It’s not caution. There’s no radio on the Franz Mueller. Remember, I told you all—it’s a captured Fur ship! They use quee, and Greentrees no longer has that capacity. I told you!”

  “I forgot,” Alex said.

  “You all have forgotten too much! I’ve tried for decades to keep up the war preparations for this city because I told you it would happen, but each year there’s more and more slack, and if we get an actual Fur attack I don’t know if anyone is prepared at all, and…”

  Jake stopped. Wrong, wrong. He was ranting, sounding exactly like an old man no one would heed. And no one was, except Alex, who was listening out of compassion rather than belief. Even now, with a ship coming in…

  Lau-Wah said, “What is the state of war preparations? Who is in charge of that?”

  Mayor Shanti said uncertainly, “Isn’t it Donald Halloran? Or, no, he died and so his assistant must have taken over. Alex?”

  She shrugged, not looking at Jake. “I know we all received a com about it, but I can’t remember the name. An Anglo, I think.”

  “Well, it would hardly be a New Quaker,” Jake said curtly, and Alex laughed. A second lat
er her face showed how much she regretted the laugh.

  The mayor said, “I know it’s serious, Jake. This ship … Alex, find out who the new defense admin is and call him here.”

  Alex nodded and opened a comlink. “Siddalee? Who’s the defense admin since Donald Halloran died? … Well, find out and get him or her here, please.” She closed her link.

  And that was another thing, Jake thought—in his day, they could have called up the information by computer. But fewer and fewer computers still worked, and Greentrees simply did not have the resources to manufacture many replacements. What they did create or adapt was usually assigned to the genetics lab, but even there people had taken to keeping the bulk of their notes on paper. Mira City numbered—what?—maybe fifteen thousand people now (once he would have known the exact number), but that wasn’t enough to sustain every aspect of a fully digital society. And a lot of those people were New Quakers, who weren’t interested in machinery, and neither were Larry Smith’s ridiculous Cheyenne… no, wait, Larry Smith was dead long ago, somebody else led the tribes, Larry had been the founder, when the Cheyenne were still learning how to live off the land and glorify it with the spirit dances Jake had attended once, at dawn in the—

  He was wandering in time again.

  “—evacuation if necessary,” Mayor Shanti said.

  “How would we do that?” Lau-Wah said. “Where could we evacuate that many people to?”

  “Our people aren’t exactly good at living off the land,” Alex said. “Maybe the Cheyenne had the right idea all along. No, don’t scowl at me, David, I was joking. There’s Siddalee comming back.”

  She listened to her call, while Jake studied her. Such a strong face. Not pretty, exactly, although her slim body curved nicely. Her features were too big and angular for feminine beauty, especially her jaw, but she had thick glossy hair, brown only slightly touched with gray, and undeniably beautiful eyes. Deep gray, wide, fringed with black lashes. Expressive eyes. Too expressive, maybe; Alex was not good at hiding her feelings. She’d had a very bad time when her young husband was killed in a mining accident, but that was long ago and she seemed all right now.