Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

After a silence, Isabelle said, “Yes. They could be. I never liked either of them, but that doesn’t… it could be. But why would they take in Kayla and Austin? Claire I can see, she’s a doctor… I’m going to talk to Noah.”

“I’ll go with you.”

The clinic was jammed with people in what was now post-op. Noah sat beside his wife’s pallet, Lily on his lap and Marianne next to him, watching carefully for signs of nausea or confusion. Llaa^moh¡ slept. Noah looked a little more alert. Salah said, “How are you feeling?”

“Headache to shake mountains.”

“To be expected. Still dizzy?”

“If I stand up.”

“Any nausea, blurred vision, confusion?”

“I don’t know.”

“Count backwards from one hundred.”

“One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-six, no wait….”

Isabelle burst out with, “Noah—what do you know about a secret cave that Austin goes to?”

“How do you know about that?” Noah said at the same moment that Marianne said “Cave?”

“It doesn’t matter how I know!” Isabelle flared. “What matters is that you didn’t tell me! I’m the mother of this lahk and—”

“Not so loud! Please!” Noah put his hand on his forehead.

“Sorry. But why didn’t you tell me? Where is this cave? Are Tony and Nathan there? Is Kayla ?”

“Kayla? No—isn’t she? You told me… it’s a little confused…”

“Isabelle,” Marianne said in a tone that could have controlled an earthquake, “go easy.”

Gradually the story emerged. Tony Schrupp and Nathan Beyon were constructing or had constructed a survivalist bunker in a mountain cave. Austin had been helping them with, Noah guessed, translation of radio broadcasts; neither man knew more than a few phrases of Kindred. ( Why? Salah wondered. If you emigrated, wouldn’t you learn the language? ) Noah had followed Austin to the cave and then promised him that he would not tell the lahk if Austin agreed to not go there again and Austin had promised, an agreement he evidently broke. Yes, the Council of Mothers knew about the bunker; supplies and equipment had been going in for months. Noah knew nothing about Kayla’s whereabouts, and this was the first time he’d heard that Claire was missing.

“That stupid kid! What does he think—”

“Easy,” Salah said. “Don’t get too agitated, Noah. We’ll get them back.”

“How? You don’t understand, the entrance is small and probably impregnable, Beyon is an electronics expert and—”

“Easy, please.”

“ Noah, ” Marianne said, and Noah subsided. The power of mothers, even if the son was nearly forty.

Isabelle stood. “Okay, I got it. You rest and don’t worry, Noah. You either, Marianne. Leo will know how to get them out.”

Leo. Salah surprised himself with a flash of jealousy so strong that his stomach jumped in his belly. She didn’t trust Lamont, but Brodie….

Salah thought he’d left this kind of sickening jealousy behind, long ago, with Aisha.

Lily whimpered and stirred. Salah laid a hand on her forehead. Still afebrile.

Marianne said, “Go now. Let them sleep. If the—”

The door flung open. Branch stood there. Like everyone else in the clinic half of the compound, he’d sustained no injury from the bomb, but now he looked so wild that he might be hallucinating. “Dr. Jenner!” he shouted.

“Branch! For God’s sake—you woke Lily!”

The little girl started to cry. Llaa^moh¡ woke despite the sedative—the power of mothers!—and said, “Lily?” Noah put his hand to his forehead. Marianne grabbed Branch and dragged him into the corridor, Isabelle and Salah following. Against the corridor wall, two Kindred lay asleep, their usual sleeping areas destroyed in Big Lab.

“Marianne!” Branch said. “I did it! I got it!”

Marianne said, “Good. Great. But Branch, right now astronomical data—”

“It’s not that! Come!”

They all followed him to the leelee room, which smelled worse than ever. Branch pointed dramatically to a complicated pile of equipment and said, “There! The code was convertible to sound and I did it!”

“Sound?” Isabelle said. “From the ship? Recordings?”

“No! Live! Real-time transmission!”

“Of what?” Marianne said.

“Listen! I’m going to turn it up—listen!”

Branch dropped to the floor and fiddled with analog dials. A light flashed briefly. Then Salah heard it. At first he thought it was coming from the cages behind him: chittering, very fast. But it wasn’t.

Isabelle said, “Leelees? There are leelees alive aboard the ship? How?”

Branch said, so fast that he was almost chittering himself, “It was a colony ship, wasn’t it? To a planet close enough for radio transmissions. Preset so that was the only place the ship could go. Big enough to hold animals and plants for a colony. When the people died, the animals didn’t! The leelees didn’t!”

Isabelle said, “Well, okay. They’re up there, but the ship is still contaminated with spores because the colonists went outside and brought them in. Everyone’s dead.”

She didn’t see it. Salah did, and Marianne had known the second the chittering began. She said now, sounding unlike herself, “The leelees aren’t dead. There are spores there, but the leelees survived. Mutated immunity, or maybe a virophage since at least two survived to breed… let it be a virophage. Oh, God!”

Isabelle said, “What’s a virophage?”

Salah said, “A satellite virus that infects larger viruses and can’t reproduce any other way.”

Marianne babbled at Salah, “ R. Sporii is large enough to be a host, it could have coevolved with the spore cloud even though… but no paramyxovirus before now has hosted… no, that’s not right, it’s a new mutation… Isabelle! You said that Ree^ka told you there was a device to call the ship back to Kindred!”

There was? Salah looked at Branch; he hadn’t known it, either.

“Yes,” Isabelle said. She didn’t look excited; maybe she didn’t realize the implications. Salah did. If they could get their hands on a virophage that naturally killed R. sporii and it was airborne—insha’Allah, let it be a virophage and let it airborne!—they could release it on Kindred and it would fight the coming spores. Thousands of people might be saved. Maybe more.

Marianne seized Isabelle’s arm. “Where is it? The device to call back the ship—does it still work? Where is it?”

“Nobody knows,” Isabelle said. “It’s gone. Buried somewhere in the mountains. Mining out the original tablets with starship plans…. they’d been there for 140,000 years! Getting them free took explosives. Caves collapsed, tunnels closed up, the ground shifted. Nothing but the coming spore cloud crisis could have led the Mothers to cause that much environmental disturbance. But Ree^ka told me that the call-back device is described in the tablets but wasn’t with the drive or the plans.

“It’s lost, and nobody knows where.”

At every slight rise in the ground, Austin expected to see someone coming after him: Noah or Isabelle or Leo or maybe one of the McGuires, whom he’d only seen a few times in his life but remembered vividly. Big, silent, scary. Although why would the McGuires come after Austin? They didn’t care about anything but their mines. No, it would be Noah or Isabelle or Leo. Maybe all three. All three would be a problem. Austin had a stolen pipe gun, but he didn’t think he could shoot Noah or Isabelle, and Leo would probably shoot him first. Certainly Lieutenant Lamont would.

He’d dragged Claire into a sort of cover made of bushes, so he could rest. Rain pattered on the dark leaves above them as Austin sat cross-legged and ate a piece of makfruit from his pocket. It was dotted with lint. He ungagged Claire—they were far enough away that no one in the compound could hear her—and held out part of the fruit.