Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause…

“Mom,” Noah said, “go to bed. You look exhausted.”

“You do, too.”

“I’m recovering from a concussion. What’s your excuse?”

“I would laugh but I’m too tired,” Marianne said. “Did Isabelle take stew out to the soldiers?”

“I did. I need to do something.”

Marianne looked at her tall, alien son, with his artificially copper skin and surgically altered eyes and the same sweet smile he’d had as a little boy. There was nothing she could do to help him save the life he loved except what Branch was already doing, Claire had already done, and Leo Brodie was trying to do from his sickbed. The only thing Marianne could do for Noah was spare him more anxiety.

“I’m going,” she said. “Tell Lily good night for me.”

“I will,” Noah said, although they both knew that Lily had been asleep for hours. But when the world was ending, Marianne had discovered, tiny normal things mattered. A lot.

To her surprise, she fell asleep almost immediately. It was a deep, restful sleep, without dreams, until, abruptly, she woke.

Silence. Darkness. Both total and complete, as if she lay in a cave, or in the womb. But an image danced before her, clear as one of the countless drawings she’d made in college biology class, nearly fifty years ago.

Marianne pressed a button on her Terran watch, which was useless for telling the time here but good for illumination. In the tiny light of its dial, she made her way from her room to the leelee lab. Branch lay heavily asleep on a pallet beside the call-back device.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

Marianne switched on a light; Branch did not stir. Gingerly she lowered herself to the floor and pulled the call-back device to her.

A four-sided pyramid, with four bumps marching down each side. Did it matter which of the bumps near the apex she called “one”? Maybe not, for what she had in mind. The universe runs on mathematics, Branch had cried, with all the passion of the young scientist. He was right, of course. The physical universe ran on mathematics. But the human universe ran on something else, something that had to be known to any race who could follow master plans to build a starship.

One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.

She pressed hard on one of the bumps near the apex. Her finger counted off the other three bumps on that face: two, three, four. Then the bump at the top of the adjoining face would be five and the one under it six. She pressed it hard.

Probably nothing would happen. Talk about your long shots….

The third button down on the next triangular face would be eleven, and the bottom button on the fourth face would be sixteen. She had spiraled down the pyramid, pressing. Her fingers returned to its pointed top, pressing the button on the face opposite where she had begun. That was bump nine. Then fourteen, three, eight, spiraling down the face of the pyramid, tracing a distinct pattern.

A double helix.

But what about that last single tone, following a much longer pause, that completed the code from the colony ship? What was that?

A ship’s number. It was the first one built, the first one launched, forty Kindred years ago. But where…

The whole thing was probably futile anyway, so did it really matter? Marianne returned her finger to the first bump she’d pressed and pressed it again, as hard as she could.

Blattt !

Marianne cried out, the noise was so loud. She slammed her hands over her ears. Branch woke and groped for a knife from under his pallet. The door flew open and Noah, in the room across the hall, rushed in.

Blattt!!!!

Then Leo Brodie stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb but upright, a rifle in his hands. He yelled something but no one could hear him, or anything else, until the device stopped blatting and a silence, shocking after all that noise, fell. More people crowded into the corridor, kept back by Leo’s slumping body.

Branch said in an incongruous whisper, “What did you do?”

Marianne said, “I think I just called back the ship with the virophage.”

In the two days since Marianne had called back the ship—if that was indeed what she had done—Salah had watched the refugee camp fill up again. People came by bicycle, by truck, by animal cart, on foot. They left their lahks just days before the spore cloud hit. Nearly all of them were furious.

“Why?” Branch had asked, puzzled. “If they think they’re going to die anyway from R. sporii , then why not stay at home and die there?”

Branch genuinely did not understand—from youth, from temperament, from the mostly sheltered life of well-off parents followed by academic research. Sometimes Salah felt very old.

“There are rumors on the radio that there is a second plague on the ship that’s coming here. A plague we Terrans are going to set loose on Kindred.”

“It’s a cure ,” Branch said. “We hope. And if they know they’re going to die of the first plague anyway—”

“Branch,” Salah said, “which would you rather face: a bout of cholera alone or a bout of cholera followed by malaria when you’ve already been weakened by the cholera? They hope that some of them will survive R. sporii , and they’re probably right. They don’t want to then be hit with another unknown plague.”

An irreverent verse flashed into Salah’s head: When the wit began to wheeze / And wine had warmed the politician, / Cured yesterday of my disease / I died last night of my physician . Mathew Prior, in the irreverent eighteenth century.

No one on Kindred would appreciate it. No one.

“Then,” Branch said, “why doesn’t the Council of Mothers tell them different?”

“Tell them what? Nobody, including us, knows how the virophage will affect humans. The camp is full of scared and angry people both wanting to stop a second plague and looking for someone to blame. That happened on Earth, too, you know.”

“I know,” Branch said, so somberly that Salah wondered if he had overestimated the young man’s innocence, after all. “I wish we knew exactly when the ship will arrive. From the astronomical data I know the location of the colony planet, but distance doesn’t seem to correlate with how the drive works.”

“No,” Salah said.

Branch looked at the clinic ceiling, as if it were the sky. “I wish I knew when it will arrive.”

“When is this fucking ship getting here?” Zoe demanded.

“No idea,” Leo said.

They had met in the clinic kitchen, both hungry, though neither of them were supposed to move yet. Bourgiba had explained that he was not a surgeon, that the best he could do with what he had here was what he’d done: remove Zoe’s spleen and patch up Leo’s liver. Leo was grateful for the medical help but hated the inactivity. It gave him too much time to think. He was grateful when Kandiss or Lu^kaj^ho came in with reports, even though the reports were all the same: Nothing happening. People are angry. No ship yet.

It left Leo with too much time to think about Owen. He tried, instead, to think about OPORDS, about assessing defenses and effectively deploying personnel. Thinking like a leader, and wasn’t that a kick in the head? Him.

Which led his thoughts back to Owen.

So he was almost glad to meet up with Zoe in the kitchen. They eyed each other warily. He had injured her; she had shot him.