Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

But the big house up the hill from the compound wasn’t Noah Jenner’s house, it was the lahk’s, and Isabelle headed the Terran lahk. Hadn’t Kandiss learned anything about how this place worked?

Leo also knew, even if Kandiss did not, who the very old lady was.

The Mother of Mothers had arrived.

“What will you do with him?” Salah asked. He’d removed Leo Brodie’s bullet from the attacker, and cleaned and dressed the wound.

“He’ll get a trial,” Isabelle said. “Or rather, he would have gotten a trial if there had been time. He might still get one. But with the cloud coming…”

“I’m surprised all the civic and business machinery has functioned this smoothly this long.”

Isabelle took a sip of her wine. “Oh, I don’t know, Salah—if, say, an asteroid were going to hit Earth and wipe out everybody in three weeks’ time, do you think most people would riot and loot and go in for orgies, or would they just go on living their normal lives?”

“Some of each, I think. But you’re right—here there is more of the latter and less of the former than on Terra.”

They sat on karthwood chairs in the courtyard of the clinic, watching the stars come out. Inside, the rooms swarmed with scientific activity, but there was at the moment nothing for Isabelle to translate or Salah to doctor. The refugee camp, that amazingly orderly group of people not going on with their normal lives, preferred their own doctors. Salah and Isabelle held glasses of fruity wine. It was too sweet for Salah’s taste, but that and a thin sour beer were the only alcoholic beverages permitted on Kindred.

“Permitted.” Kindred had totalitarian control without totalitarian force, a combination that endlessly intrigued him. So did Isabelle Rhinehart, but he wasn’t ready to admit that yet, not even to himself.

“You lost your three main cities. Yet government and business and everything else are carrying on.”

“We lost so many.” Grief in the drawn lines of her face, the droop of her body. “But World is pretty decentralized. Manufacturies are all located away from cities. People are making do, around their mourning.”

“I’m sure decentralization helps. Still, it’s remarkable that Kindred society exists at all. In fact, it shouldn’t. It’s such a delicate balance between local rule and overarching beliefs.”

“I guess so.”

“I think a society’s ideas about what it means to be human shape its institutions, and then those institutions shape individuals, because they must adapt to the system. But you can only stretch biology so far. Hierarchies—pecking orders—are built into human DNA. On Kindred, the possibility for fragmentation must be a constant threat.”

“Not really,” Isabelle said. “Bu^ka^tel.”

She had tried to explain the word before, and hadn’t really succeeded. Isabelle, though very intelligent, was not an intellectual. But as far as Salah could grasp, bu^ka^tel—the three syllables had rising inflections that he could never quite duplicate correctly—was the basic ethical and organizational principle on Kindred. It somehow combined law, rank, sharing, and maternal responsibility in a rich mixture impossible for the American mind to sort out. Rank neither trumped law nor was law; Kindred was not an oligarchy. The rule of Mothers carried both heavy expectations and the expectation of obedience from everyone else. Only, however, within the limits of sharing, which limits were somehow bound up with maternalism. Even women who didn’t birth children were “mothers” because children belonged to the society as a whole, except when their allegiance belonged to their lahk, or something like that. Maybe. What was clear was that everyone, mothers and men and lahks, belonged first to World, as stewards of its ecology. All of that checked runaway consumption, even though the economic structure made room for capitalism as well as socialism. There was no government welfare, since a lahk was deeply responsible for everyone born into it.

But there were still elements of bu^ka^tel that Salah felt eluded him completely.

He returned to the more concrete subject of the intruder. “A trial of his peers?”

“No. Of mothers in the local jurisdiction. Only mothers can serve as judges, because mothers have the greatest investment in the future.”

“On Earth,” Salah said, “there are countries—small ones—that only permit men who have served in the military to vote because they have earned it by risking their lives.”

“We don’t have a military. Kindred chose to build institutions around life, not death.”

“Not really fair, Isabelle. Too easy.”

“I know.” She frowned; her profile in the faint light looked classical. “When I first got here, I was so confused by everything. It just seemed wrong to deliberately choose not to make all the tech they could, to not let everyone have as many children as they wanted, to be so… controlling . Fascist. And then there was a period when I decided World was a utopia. It’s not, you know—don’t make the mistake of thinking that. We have crime, legal disputes, income inequality, all that shit. But no real poverty because working wages are controlled and families are obligated to take care of shiftless Uncle No^kal^te and idiot cousin Ko—and they do. No unhappy marriages because spouses stay with their own lahks as much as they choose, and marriage contracts are time-limited. No starvation because the continent grows food almost faster than it can be harvested. So now…”

“Now?” he prompted.

“I love it here.” She said it so simply, and with such pain, that Salah fell silent. More stars appeared, strange stars in strange configurations. Lights shone from the rooms around the courtyard, their yellow electric circles not reaching Salah and Isabelle.

She said, “The prisons aren’t terrible but they aren’t luxurious, either. No basketball courts or college courses or any of that crap. They’re places of punishment for hurting the social group. But sentences are short and recidivism is fairly low.”

“Is there capital punishment?”

“Yes. Take a life, lose yours.”

He tested her. “What is the recidivism rate?”

“Three point eight percent.”

He was sure then. Something in her voice had alerted him, and her precision about the number made him sure. “You’ve been in prison.”

She turned to look at him. He could just make out her smile. “You’re perceptive. Yes, on Terra. I was a scrappy kid. Juvenile offender, for grand theft auto. Plus a few other things, later. Then I wanted to get a job and go straight, and nobody would hire me. When Noah said anyone with the L-31 mitochondria could leave Earth, I volunteered. Kayla and Austin—he was three then—came with me because…. well, because.”

Salah could guess at the reasons. Isabelle was the strong one, the “scrappy” one. Kayla, with no skills and mother of a toddler, depended on her sister. Kayla had gone uneasily to World, and now blamed Isabelle for it every minute of every day.

He said, “But you were bright. You did well in school. Your speech patterns, your breadth of knowledge—”

“That’s enough about me,” Isabelle said, with more than a touch of belligerence. “What’s your story? Why did you volunteer for this mission?”

Salah drained his wine. How much of his face could she see in the dim light? But she had been honest, so he was, too. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know why you volunteered to leave your planet and go to God-knows-what? You don’t know?”

“I’m not sure I know why I’ve done anything in my life.” Except Aisha, but he was not going to tell her that stupid story.

A figure passed above them on the roof, a Ranger on patrol. From its bulk, Mason Kandiss.