CROSSFIRE Read online

  Now Shipley lay, exhausted, in his bunk on the Ariel, staring into the darkness. He and Tariji had awakened thirty-six people, of the six thousand in cold sleep. Twenty-four had already gone down to Greentrees, including Naomi. The other twelve would go down tomorrow morning, when Shipley would begin reviving another thirty-six. After that, the awakenings would pause until the people on the ground had built enough facilities to temporarily house the next groups of arrivees. It had all been planned carefully, taking advantage of the quee-described experiences of military settlers on the other four Earth-like planets, and of Jake and Gail's meticulous, intelligent research.

  Meticulous. Intelligent. Planned. Such good qualities, and not one had helped Shipley with his daughter. Just as nothing helped now.

  Why had Naomi even chosen to come to Greentrees? It had been decades since she'd attended a meeting for worship. Shipley had been astonished by her decision to join the rest of the family in emigration. Astonished, then elated. Maybe, he had thought then, Naomi's own inner light could still be found, still be heeded. Maybe she had begun to heed it. Greentrees could be a new beginning for her, just as it was going to be for the New Quakers who desired to pursue their faith away from the corrupting, deadening, blaring materialism of Earthly global culture.

  Now Shipley was not so sure. Lying in the darkness, he chastised himself for his doubts. Naomi had chosen to come here, to leave her former life. He, her father, must have faith in her. Act in accordance with trust in the Light, and the rest would follow. "Let your life speak," George Fox had told the first Quakers nearly six hundred years ago. Shipley must do that, and then trust that his life, and the shared life of the Meeting, spoke to Naomi.

  His eyes burned. He wished he could still love her. That was the worst, the struggle to love his own daughter. It horrified him that he wished Tariji Brown were his child instead of Naomi. Or the brisk, pragmatic Gail Cutler. Or even Lucy Lasky, whose psychotic episode on the Ariel had actually shown to Shipley the humility and pliancy of the girl's essential nature.

  He lay there sleepless above the beautiful planet, trying not to hate himself, trying to love his terrifying daughter.

  4

  Gail stood beside Jake Holman at the edge of the "city," its work-in-progress clutter behind her and the rolling Greentrees plain before her, saying good-bye to 967 Cheyenne Native Americans. Nothing, she thought, about this new planet was as amazing as these demented romantics and their demented plans.

  "We are leaving now," Larry Smith said formally. He was a short, stocky man with brown hair and intelligent light gray eyes, dressed in a brown coverall of practically indestructible Threadmore. On Earth, he had been a cattle breeder. Now he was a Cheyenne chief.

  Beyond him, on the plain covered with dense purple ground-cover, men and women began to pull travois made of newly felled trees reinforced with rods of diamond fiber. Heaped on the clumsy hybrid contraptions were packs covered with Threadmore tarps. Among the travois moved solar-powered rovers, looking as if they'd strayed in from a different millennium. As, of course, they had.

  "You can comlink with either us or the ship whenever you choose," Gail said to Larry, because she had to say something and what could possibly be appropriate? There were no precedents.

  "We won't choose to," he said. "Not unless you break the contract."

  And what could one say to that? We promise to keep our treaty with your people? There was a rich history of how well that had worked out.

  "Well, good-bye," Gail said awkwardly.

  "Good-bye, Gail Cutler. May the spirit be with you."

  "And you," Gail said.

  Larry Smith turned to his waiting tribe. They had all been awakened over the last weeks and transported downstairs by shuttle, where they had immediately erected temporary teepees beyond the perimeter of Mira City.

  When Smith was out of earshot, Gail said accusingly to Jake, "You might have helped me out there, instead of just standing there grinning."

  "I wasn't grinning."

  "You were grinning inside. Oh, Lord, how weird people are! They really think they can duplicate a tribal, hunter-gatherer civilization that's mostly a romanticized figment of the imagination anyway."

  "That's too harsh," Jake said, watching the Cheyenne pull away. "They're making modern adaptations, planetary adaptations."

  "They certainly are," Gail said. "Look over there. That's a fully equipped genetics lab in that huge rover."

  "It's only until they determine what's edible and what's not," Jake said.

  Gail snorted. The Cheyenne rovers, genetics lab, and gear had taken up a surprising amount of room on the Ariel, for which the Cheyenne had paid well. Smith's "tribe" was a splinter group, made up of individuals and families burning with idealism for this new life, which was being financed with the genemod clinic earnings of several generations. Their contract with Mira Corp detailed just what services the corporation would provide until and through awakenings, and then specified that there would be no formal ties at all after that, and no "intrusion" on the large subcontinent they were claiming as their own.

  "Do you think they'll make it?" Gail asked Jake. She watched a woman struggle to pull a travois a respectful distance around a patch of red creeper.

  "Of course they'll make it. They know as much about the planet as we do."

  "Which is to say, effectively nothing."

  "Gail, have you ever been on a Native American reservation?"

  "No. Have you?"

  "Yes," he said, surprising her. "And I've read about them. Once they were terrible places, the dregs of the arable land, full of poverty and alcoholism. Since the natives figured out that as a separate nation they could legally offer services that places part of the United States could not, they flourished. First gambling, then genemod and pet-cloning clinics, and—"

  "I'm aware that reservations are great scientific centers," Gail said dryly. "And greenly rich. That's why I don't understand why this lot wants to dump it all and go back to living as if the last two or three centuries hadn't ever happened. But with genetic labs in tow, of course."

  "Ah, you're a socialized creature," Jake said. "Planted in the middle of your huge family."

  "Hardly. Only six of them are awake yet. My family's at the end of the list."

  "A quibble. You're a social person, and you never seem to realize that many, many people want desperately to escape society and never look back."

  Gail looked curiously at Jake. He still watched the retreating Cheyenne, growing smaller as they trekked across the grassy plain toward the distant mountains. Jake seldom spoke about his past. She wasn't sure he was doing so now.

  "Jake—"

  "Do you know that Larry Smith is changing his name? All of them are. But they'll wait to choose new names until some incident happens to them or the tribe sees some personal characteristic emerge. Apparently that's how it was done once."

  "So the next time we see Larry Smith, he'll be Man Who Owns Genetic Lab?"

  "You think it's funny," Jake said. "Do you think Shipley's funny, too, escaping to a new life with his New Quakers?"

  She had to be honest. "No, or anyway not as funny. At least he's prepared to live with a star-faring civilization. But I can't even figure out what his group believes or doesn't believe. Can you?"

  "I don't try," Jake said dismissively. After seven mortally long years, Gail knew well that Shipley made Jake uneasy. The New Quakers were being steadily awakened and transported downstairs—how was Jake going to react when he lived surrounded by two thousand of them?

  She said, "Tell me—did you include the Quakers in the voyage only because without their third share, you wouldn't have been able to raise enough money?"

  "Of course. That's why we included everybody, including your family and Larry Smith's Cheyenne. You know that."

  "But I don't know why you couldn't have waited a few more years to see if anyone more congenial to you turned up. What difference did a few years make when you were leaving Ear
th forever?" She had wanted to ask him this for a long time.

  "No difference," Jake said lightly. "Anyway, I worry more about the Arabs than the New Quakers. Shipley's lunatics are at least democratic. I know Faisal explained to us how his family has always been political and religious moderates and that's why he had to leave his country when a new militant regime took over so they wanted a new start in a fresh place. But nonetheless..."

  Gail stared at Jake. They'd been over all this many times before; Jake sounded as if he were offering the rehash mostly to distract her. From what?

  Abruptly he said, "Come on, we'll be late for the Board meeting," and strode back toward camp.

  She should be used to his evasions by now. After ten years as partners, nearly seven of them confined to the Ariel, Gail knew everything about Jake: what he liked to eat, how often he burped, what jokes he thought funny, what gifts he'd received on his sixth birthday, his grades at law school. Yet she sometimes felt she didn't know him at all, that he understood her far better than the reverse.

  Or maybe she just wasn't that hard to understand.

  At eight years old, Gail had been taken by Aunt Tamara, now in cold sleep on the Ariel, to a religious meeting in a huge, gleaming sports arena in Portland, Oregon. Preachers had thundered about the death and destruction coming to adulterers, geneticists, thieves, and the nonbelieving nonrighteous. They would all perish in rivers of fire and ravishments of the Earth. The next day, a quake in the fault under Portland had killed seven thousand people.

  The effect on Gail had been the opposite of the preachers' intentions. She watched the newsvids, and even at eight she could see that both the righteous and the nonrighteous, believers and non-, had all died the same way. She'd been impressed by the impersonal, immense power of nature, that same power she thrilled to in thunderstorms, and had decided then and there to become a scientist.

  Gail's mother, an evolutionary biologist, had been furious when she found out that Aunt Tamara had taken Gail to the revival. Emily Cutler was an evolutionary biologist of strong but eccentric views. She believed that men and women could never live happily together. "It's the only reasonable conclusion," she'd said patiently, "for anybody who will consider reason. Male and female humans evolved to fill different niches: hunter-competitor and gatherer-nurturer. Eight thousand years of so-called civilization can't undo five million years of evolution. Men and women aren't different species, but they are variants of the same species, and to expect them to enjoy living together is like expecting wolves and poodles to share a lair. They should live separately and visit."

  A decade later, when Gail announced to her family that she was gay, Aunt Tamara blamed her sister Emily's teachings. Everyone else nodded and smiled and asked why Gail was failing both chemistry and physics.

  Science bored her. But money did not, and at nineteen she had a degree in business. At twenty-five she was managing more of the familial investments than anyone else in her sprawling, ecologically-obsessed family. By then she'd met Lahiri and life was full and complete, sweet with the buttery-rich taste of happiness.

  Then Lahiri had died, slowly and horribly, of a genetically altered virus released by a terrorist trying to hold Minneapolis hostage to some cracked political demand. Lahiri shouldn't even have been in Minneapolis; it was an unplanned business trip. The UV and CO2 levels of Earth had risen in twenty years to heights that hadn't been supposed to occur, according to scientific predictions, for another century. The rich grew richer, and as the poor grew poorer in a federation of North Atlantic nations not used to patience, domestic violence and domestic terrorism increased. International terrorism had become a given. Genetic fixes to crops began to lose the race against resistant blights and increased population.

  Gail's family voted to get out. Gail had come to Jake, and from the first he had seemed to understand that after Lahiri, there would never be anyone else for Gail. No one else understood that. Jake and Gail had become working partners and squabbling friends, and never once had she felt he'd let her see who he really was.

  There goes Faisal, elegant as usual," Jake said as they approached the ugly inflatable structure serving as a general gathering hall. "All the royal family seems to be adjusting well."

  "The male half, anyway," Gail said acidly. "How would we know about the women? They hardly ever leave that compound or whatever it is, and then they're veiled."

  "You know that when we talked to them before we left Earth," Jake said mildly. "All of them agreed that this was how they wanted to live. Even with voice-stress analysis."

  And what a battle that had been, to get the Arabs to agree to voice analyses of their women. Gail suspected that Faisal, cosmopolitan and practical, had used leverage Gail didn't want to know about. But Jake was right: even under VSA, which had shown no deception, the Arab women, royals and servants alike, had avowed that this was the way they wanted to live. Behind walls, in Mira City but not really of it.

  So now the northern section of the city east of the river was surrounded by a ten-foot wall of foamcast. Within the medina, Gail knew but had not personally seen, were more walls segregating the women's quarters, the andarun. She imagined courtyards out of old Persian woodcuts, with fountains and flower beds and veiled dark-eyed women, childlike and protected. But she didn't really know. When he was outside its walls, Faisal spoke very little of his private kingdom. His lieutenants—all male, of course, many of whom seemed to be his sons—followed his example. Except for ceremonial occasions, Faisal wore the same brown Threadmore coverall as Jake, as Gail herself.

  She knew he had three wives, Jabbareh and Homy and Khanom, but he never mentioned them. All that Mira City was allowed to glimpse of life in the medina was the minaret rising tall above the walls, the cry calling the faithful to prayer, the occasionally interrupted meeting while Faisal knelt, without prayer rug or apology, toward Sol to pray.

  "We wish to restore the true Islamic ways," he had told Gail and Jake when first he'd come to them with his proposition to join the Greentrees colony. "The warm, joyful heart of Islam, grounded in family. Not the fanatic warmongering it has become."

  "But your women—" Gail had begun, Faisal cut her off.

  "Our women themselves will assure you that they wish to live by the old precepts."

  And so they had, even through the VSAs Gail had insisted on. She didn't like it, this perpetuation of a patriarchy on a new planet, but as Jake had acidly pointed out, she didn't have to like it. As long as the Arabs would live and let live, which they had done, their gods did not have to be her gods.

  "I think they only have one," she'd said through gritted teeth.

  "Whatever," Jake had shrugged.

  And, really, was it any stranger than Larry Smith and his Cheyenne going off to resurrect the dead gods of Nature?

  "Hello," Faisal said, pausing at the door of the tent. Today, for whatever reason, he'd put off the coverall. His white robes actually looked comfortable and attractive against Greentrees' cool blues and purples.

  "Hello, Faisal," Gail said. Did his retinue call him "Your Highness"? Only the Chinese contingent and Gail's own family, it seemed to her, had come with their faces turned toward the future and not the past.

  Jake said, "Are they all in there? And will we be able to get any of them to speak English?"

  Faisal laughed. The Board of Governors met twice every month. A "month" had been defined as the transit of the largest of the three moons, Gamma. (And how much imagination did it show to name them Alpha, Beta, Gamma? Never mind, there was enough else to imagine.) One monthly meeting was to assess and plan progress on Mira City and to cope with any problems, which so far had been astonishingly few. The second meeting, held today, was to hear reports from the scientists who provided the raw data for assessing, planning, and coping. It was the scientists, with their specialized jargon, who didn't speak English.

  They were a varied lot. Nine scientists in various disciplines, and only Robert Takai, engineer, had paid his own way. The ot
hers were all funded by the Wellcome Trust, a British foundation with a centuries-old tradition of taking risks on scientific endeavors without any payback except information of benefit to humanity. Gail wasn't sure that the information from Greentrees, faithfully sent back by quee, was of any use to the Wellcome Trust, or to anybody else on Earth. Strange to think that all the trustees who had funded these scientists were dead and buried. Seventy years had passed on Earth.

  And everything was as bad, or worse, than when the Ariel had left. Water, hunger, terrorism, despair, air quality, politics, greed. CO2 levels up, food production down, global weather so extreme that much of the planet was in either flood or drought.

  "I've identified and analyzed three more geological strata," said Roy Callipare, the geologist, and Gail stopped listening. These reports were necessary but boring. Although not to the scientists, who heeded, argued, laughed with, and attacked each other as if the presence or absence of beryl was a matter of life and death.

  Gail gazed furtively around, trying not to be obvious about her inattention. Fengmo, the Chinese member of the Board, was absent today, busy with something else. The others, except for Faisal in his white robes, blended with the inflatable: brown or green coveralls against the dull green walls and gray foamcast furniture. Well, eventually Mira City would become more colorful. The inflatables were only temporary, and so were the coveralls, although new clothing was far down everyone's list of priorities. Still, someone could have at least brought in a vase of Greentrees flowers.

  Lucy Lasky gave a brief report as colorless as the surroundings. The paleontologist had kept to herself since her awakening, going out every day with the geologist in one of the two-person rovers. They'd sampled more than a dozen sites and then settled on one about seven miles away that, as Gail understood it, had both a lot of rocks and a lot of fossils. Gail put herself on automatic throughout Lucy's presentation.