CROSSFIRE Page 6

  From the groundcover the tall, narrow trees rose like graceful spires. The blue river wound its slow, broad way between low hills, through groves and meadows. A herd of something large and gray lumbered toward a lake. "We're calling them 'teelies,' " George said into Jake's ear. "Warm-blooded herbivores, brains the size of walnuts. Move very slowly."

  "Why don't they get eaten?"

  "They do. But not easily—that's a thick carapace you're seeing on the adults. Also, there's speculation that their flesh tastes bad to the dominant predators."

  "God bless evolution," Jake said.

  The landscape didn't change as they covered hundreds of miles. Restful, beautiful, monotonous. This part of Greentrees lacked mountains, although they rose elsewhere, sharp and high. It was a young planet compared to Earth.

  "Approaching the village," Lieutenant Wortz said in her guttural accent. "Landing imminent."

  Jake wondered briefly if he'd ever heard any of Scherer's crew talk without stiff military lingo. Halberg, maybe, but not Wortz, whose English was limited.

  Jake's brief glimpse of the village from the air looked exactly the same as the recordings. Thatch-roofed huts, outdoor stone hearths, small fields beyond. A few Furs walked between the huts; when the humans emerged from the lander, they stopped and watched.

  Watched—but nothing else. The three adults and one child didn't flee, or approach, or as far as Jake could see, change expression. He took a deep breath. "Let's go, people."

  Halberg left the skimmer first, ready to cover the others if necessary. Then Jake, followed by the scientists, with Shipley bringing up the rear. Jake had learned long ago how detached and artificial could seem the most important moments of one's life, as if you watched yourself from the outside. I'm walking toward humanity's first contact with aliens, Jake thought, and although his chest tightened, he still felt like an actor playing a faintly ludicrous part.

  The four Furs had not moved. Weren't they going to do something? Apparently not. Jake stopped, Halberg to his right, a few yards from the closest one and smiled. No response.

  "Hello," Jake said carefully.

  Nothing.

  "Humans," he said, pointing to himself and then Halberg.

  Nothing.

  Behind him, Shipley said, "Give him the gifts."

  Jake half turned and Shipley was right there, ready with the cooking pot, which Jake had forgotten about. Ingrid and George were undoubtedly recording. Jake took the pot and offered it to the Fur. The other three Furs had not moved, even the child.

  The Fur looked at the shiny pot but made no move to take it. Jake held it out for ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Finally he put it on the ground at the Fur's feet and, smiling, pointed from it to the alien.

  "Back away from the gift," Shipley suggested, "so he realizes we're leaving the pot for them."

  Jake did. The Fur watched impassively. A full minute went by. Then the Fur walked away, leaving the pot on the ground. Halberg tensed. The Fur went to the edge of the closest field, picked up what seemed to be a primitive hoe, and began digging up plants. The other Furs started to move about what was presumably their normal business.

  George said, "I think we've been rejected."

  Jake said, "More like they barely registered us. Just a momentary interruption, then routine as usual."

  Ingrid said, "What now? Can we go into the village?"

  Halberg said, "Counterindicated."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Lieutenant," she snapped, "they're obviously not belligerent. And what's the point of coming at all if we don't make some sort of connection?"

  George said, "Jake?"

  "Might as well." He felt helpless. What did you do when aliens considered you irrelevant?

  They walked forward as a group. The adult with the child had moved to a cookfire and was stirring something in a large pot. It smelled vile. As the humans approached, the Fur looked up but didn't stop stirring. The child stood as impassive as the adult.

  Children, if they weren't shy, were usually curious. Slowly Jake reached inside the pocket of his coverall and pulled out a small flashlight. It was bright orange, with a blue button. Jake pressed the button and a beam of light shone onto the stones of the hearth. Jake released the button and held the flashlight out to the child. He heard someone draw in a quick breath. Images of animals savagely defending their young flashed across Jake's brain, but he went on holding out the flashlight.

  The child didn't take it.

  Jake laid it on the edge of the hearth and moved back a step. The child didn't pick up the flashlight. The adult Fur went on stirring the pot.

  "Jesus Christ," Ingrid said. "They're either stupid or blind."

  George said, "If they're not going to notice anything we do, then I want to take some samples."

  "Counterindicated!" Halberg said. George ignored the soldier and stepped up to the child. He put his hand on the child's furry head, and Jake tensed for attack. The child looked up briefly at George and then returned to watching the pot. Deftly George snipped a handful of fur with the cutter concealed in his palm. Neither Fur reacted.

  In the field, the other adult hoed. The fourth Fur had gone inside a hut.

  Now, perversely, Jake wanted some reaction from the aliens. Attack, fury, anything but this stolid pretense that the humans barely existed, were somehow as insubstantial as ghosts. He said, "We're moving toward that hut."

  Halberg didn't even say, "Counterindicated." Maybe even he was frustrated by this nonbehavior. The five humans moved to the open door of the nearest hut. No one tried to stop them. Jake peered inside, George eagerly beside him, Ingrid and Shipley crowding behind.

  The inside of the hut held a pallet of tree branches, a cooking pot full of the same smelly stuff as the first Fur's culinary efforts, and an adult Fur nursing an infant. She lay on the ground on her side, the baby lying beside her with its mouth fastened on the teat exposed from underneath the thick reddish fur. She stared at them without reacting.

  Jake felt an odd reluctance to remain. "We've gone far enough into these ... people's privacy as it is. Back to the skimmer."

  The group moved out of the hut and walked back to the skimmer. Not one Fur looked up or ceased work as they boarded and lifted off.

  "Something," George Fox said, "is very wrong with this picture."

  6

  William Shipley sat in meeting and knew he was making a mess of it.

  Meeting for Worship was usually the best time of Shipley's week. He emptied his mind and waited, in blessed silence, for the inner light. If it did not come to him, it might come to another, who would be moved to rise and offer vocal ministry. From these voices, over time, came the harmony and simplicity of truth, and Shipley left the meetinghouse feeling at peace with himself. This was true even if the entire hour passed with no one saying anything. In the shared silence was a shared spirituality, sweeter than words.

  But not this week. Shipley looked at the Friends seated on the simple foamcast benches of the new meetinghouse. It, too, was foamcast, a plain windowless room without distracting adornment. New Quakers, like the old, had no icons, liturgy, priests, or theology.

  They had been meeting outdoors, but it had rained hard three Sundays in a row, and so each meeting had taken the time and allocated the resources to erect a meetinghouse. Nineteen of them dotted Mira City, which otherwise consisted still of inflatables with the occasional converted section of the Ariel a gleaming hard anomaly. In the medina, Faisal said, the Arabs had begun constructing a wooden mansion with wood from the newly formed, ecologically safe Mira Logging Company. So far the mansion was merely a frame. Mira City was green inflatable buildings and gray foamcast meetinghouses.

  Nearly a hundred Friends sat in silence, eyes cast down or closed, for half an hour. A few were missing. Alia Benton had fallen and fractured her femur; Shipley had her in a monitor cast that delivered genemod meds to help the bone mend faster. Paul Dubrowski had developed an allergy to something on Greentrees, which was interesting b
ecause it meant the human immune system was adjusting to new irritants. Marlie and Harrel Forrester had been moved to attend a different meeting this week, as had young Guy Lowell, whom Shipley suspected of interest in a young woman there. And, of course, Naomi was missing.

  But his daughter was not what was distracting Shipley from worship.

  Cameron Farley rose. She said, "I wrestled with myself this week. A coworker at the greenhouse, not a Friend, wore a necklace of beautiful pink stones. I wanted it. I asked her if she would sell it for Mira script, and she said she would. I have the script. But I know that the necklace is pulling me away from simplicity. I feel it. I would not own the necklace, it would own me. I haven't bought it ... but I still want to." She sat down, a beautiful young woman troubled in her mind by a string of pink stones.

  No, by a struggle with materialistic desires. A person preoccupied with things is ill-suited to sit in silence and listen for the still small voice of God.

  Nor, Shipley thought, is a person preoccupied with genetic information.

  George Fox, Ingrid Johnson, and Todd McCallum were holding a meeting—so different from this meeting—later today to discuss the results of their genetic analysis of the hair taken from the child Fur. The biologist and two geneticists had been working furiously for a week. In that time Jake had led expeditions to two of the other three villages, and he, too, was going to report the outcomes. A small group had been dropped off just this morning outside the first village, to camp there and see if prolonged contact made any difference to the Furs' impassivity. And none of this should have been cluttering up Shipley's mind during Meeting for Worship.

  Old David Ornish rose. "New Quakers don't need or want a lot of things in their lives. That's why we came here. So our children can be freed from the relentless pressure of owning things and find the Light." He creaked down again.

  Ten more minutes passed. Then Olivia Armstead rose and Shipley suppressed an uncharitable groan. Olivia was an intelligent, educated woman with no STOP code. More than once someone had risen after twenty or thirty minutes to tell Olivia, "Friend, bring your message to a conclusion."

  "These aliens on this planet," she began with no preamble. By now everyone knew about the aliens, most people watching the recordings whenever they had pauses in the endless work of setting up a pioneering society. "Historically there are five states in which diplomatic relationships can exist between peoples."

  And they were going to hear all five, Shipley knew. He made himself listen. If Olivia was moved to share this, then it was part of her Light and a contribution to the truth that emerged only as the Light brought out the best in each worshipper.

  Olivia said, "First, there is complete detachment, no relationship at all, as when countries refuse to recognize or trade with each other.

  "Second, there is healthy negotiation from a basically allied position, with mutual-aid pacts, trade agreements, arbitration, open borders. This is the relationship that we New Quakers have with the other contractees of Mira Corp on Greentrees.

  "Third, there is covert struggle, with no open hostility but no negotiation, either, and with subversive actions to undermine each other.

  "Fourth, there is a dominant/dependent relationship. It may be benevolent or tyrannical. This is what imperial powers have had with their colonies throughout Earth's history.

  "Fifth, there is war.

  "We must not engage in war with the Furs. Nor in dictatorship, nor in covert struggle, nor in pretending these people do not exist. We must treat them as allies." She sat down.

  Shipley was impressed. Olivia had been not only intelligent but relatively brief. But how did you treat as "allies," with mutual aid and trade pacts and contractual agreements, people who were treating you with "complete detachment"?

  No one else spoke. When the hour was over, David Ornish reached for the hand of the person sitting next to him. Everyone raised their heads and then clasped hands. The shift from inner faith to outer activism was complete, and the Meeting for Worship was over.

  Outside, people mingled and chatted. This meeting was a sociable lot. Many Friends looked refreshed and cleansed. Shipley thought that he himself might as well have spent the time growing med cultures. He had been incapable of receiving the Light.

  He hurried along the unpaved "streets." These were lately clean of garbage or debris, and around a few of the inflatables bloomed beds of those transplanted native flowers approved by Maggie Striker, the ecologist. Before the Furs had been discovered, George Fox had been creating a taxonomy and genetic history for Greentrees flora. Now that he was working day and night on the alien samples, people had started to invent their own names for the prettiest flowers. Shipley had heard the same delicate mauve blossom referred to as "moonweed," "Greentrees lace," and "sweet Leela."

  When he reached the inflatable, Ingrid Johnson had already begun talking. The scientists and Board of Governors listened with all the rapt focus Shipley had not been able to summon in meeting.

  "Todd and I finished the genome analysis. In the short version: the Furs' genome is DNA-based, like everything else we've encountered in space, which only strengthens the panspermia theory. They're pretty much like Earth mammals: warm-blooded, probably viviparous. The crest of darker fur on their backs seem to occur only in males. The genes that correspond to a neural system in the other Greentrees mammals, however, are not very numerous. They're an old species—there is a lot of incorporated fossilized genetic material, from analogues to viruses. We've started matching protein expression to genetic sequence, but of course without tissue samples from the Furs we're just guessing. The basis for our guesses is the data we have from other Greentrees' mammals, which may or may not be analogous."

  Todd said, with his quiet smile that Shipley always found so much more appealing than his wife's assertiveness, "In other words, we don't know anything."

  "Not true, Todd," Ingrid said, contradictory even with her spouse. "We have some information."

  "Okay," Gail said. She seemed to be chairing the meeting. "We can hear the long form later. Will we nongeneticists understand it?"

  "No," Ingrid said.

  "Yes," Todd said, "if we explain well enough."

  Gail smiled. "Who's next? Jake?"

  "We visited the other three villages in the cluster, if that's what it is. The reaction was exactly the same: total indifference. We might as well not have existed. We left some more gifts, and when we went back the Furs were using the cooking pots and hearth grates, but they gave no sign the things were in any way connected to us.

  "One village is the same size as the first one. The other two are much smaller. In fact, one has only sixteen Furs in it and seven empty huts."

  Shipley said, despite his vow to simply listen, "They're dying out?"

  Jake made an odd gesture with his left hand, swiping it sideways through the air. "It would seem so. We actually looked for some sort of graveyard, but we didn't find any markers for it. Maybe they don't have any death rites."

  George Fox said, "I'm a biologist, not an anthropologist, but there's no human civilization at that level that didn't have some death rites."

  "Well, then, maybe they do," Jake said. Shipley saw that the subject made him uncomfortable. "We didn't see it."

  Gail said, "Could there have been a plague or something? And these are the only survivors?"

  "No," Lucy Lasky said. "That's not possible."

  Shipley studied her. Lucy spoke firmly but met no one's eyes. Color mottled her cheeks. Clearly she was still deeply ashamed of her breakdown on the ship and thought that because of it, no one would take her seriously. Equally clearly, she was certain of what she was saying.

  It was always the conscientious, hardworking ones, Shipley thought, who were the most vulnerable. The people who cared. Those who didn't care, who just wanted to get through the job or the day or the hour and to hell with everyone who didn't like it— those people were protected from shame by their own indifference.

  Like
Naomi.

  Lucy forced herself to continue. "I know I've said this before. But there is no fossil record of the Furs. They weren't a numerous species wiped out by plague. They didn't even evolve here. I've been to the village with Jake and took subterranean soundings. There's some archaeological debris there, which there isn't here by Mira City. The Furs might have been there as long as a thousand years. But no longer. There just isn't any paleontological evidence."

  Todd said, "But, Lucy, if they'd been here even a thousand years, there would be more of them. The gene pool is really small."

  "Yes," Lucy said. "That's what I'm saying. The evidence doesn't add up. The Furs didn't evolve here. They were brought here, no more than, say, twelve hundred E-years ago. They were brought."

  "By whom, Lucy?" George said gently. "We've never found any evidence of sentient life anywhere outside the solar system. Let alone a star-faring civilization. Surely we'd have detected them— or, more likely, they'd have contacted us. We're not all that far from home, remember, in interstellar terms."

  "I know all that," Lucy said, not without dignity.

  Shipley thought suddenly of that object streaming past the Ariel at ninety-eight percent of c, back when the ship had still been light-years from Greentrees. Everyone had finally decided it had been either a computer error or a natural object, convinced by the fact that the "object" didn't seem able to detect the Ariel Only Erik Halberg had maintained otherwise.

  Lucy continued, "But the evidence on Greentrees still says that the Furs were brought here."

  "You mean, absence of evidence," Ingrid said. "You've only offered what isn't here. As far as we know yet."

  Gail said, "Captain Scherer?"

  Scherer said in his German accent, "The satellite data fail to show some additional settlements of Furs on Greentrees. But I caution. We have a good resolution, to a quarter meter, but the computer still orthorectifies all data, it does not finish yet. And the planet is big. If some settlements are small and put themselves under many trees, we maybe not find them. Not yet, anyway. We look, still.