Нэнси Кресс - If Tomorrow Comes

As well as affecting every other life-form. On the colony ship, the virophage had changed parts of the leelees’ brains. It wasn’t obvious what effect this had on the animals, if any. But it had happened.

Marianne touched her forehead, wondering.

Leo had recovered from his gunshot wound, and Zoe from her surgery. “I feel fine,” he said irritably to Dr. Patel, who had insisted on a thorough exam. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “You’re a very bad patient, Lieutenant Brodie. And Ranger Berman is worse.”

Leo had given up on trying to get anybody to address his unit by their right ranks, including the unit. He said, “I have better things to do than to lie here and—”

“Lieutenant,” Lu^kaj^ho said over his wrist radio, in Kindred, “two groups come at the compound, one by north and one by south.”

“I will come now,” Leo said in Kindred.

Dr. Patel said in English, “You’re picking up the language really fast.”

“Have to. Thanks, Doc.” He was already scrambling into his armor.

By the time he’d climbed up to the roof, it was obvious who the group from the north was. Young women, led by Graa^lok. Austin raced out of the compound, past the now deserted refugee camp, to meet them.

Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “The prodigal son comes home.”

“What is this?”

No way Leo could explain. Actually, Leo wasn’t sure, either, what the story was about—it was a phrase people used. From the Bible, maybe? Or Shakespeare? Most everything seemed to come from Shakespeare.

Salah Bourgiba would have known. Hell, he would have recited the whole damn poem. If it was a poem.

Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “It is not a thing,” and turned his scope south.

A group of men on bicycles, heavily laden with gear. This was more serious. Leo snapped out orders. Before the bicycles got into firing or bomb-throwing range—assuming they had no weapons more advanced than Leo had seen here before—Zoe had the peacekeepers in defensive position. Kandiss had hustled the group on the plain into the compound, along with Dr. Jenner, who’d been picking vegetables in the kitchen garden. Leo had his full kit brought up to the roof. Then they all waited.

The group on bicycles got closer. They were all old men.

Leo set his lips together. One thing that had made defense easier on Kindred than in Brazil, in Afghanistan, in so many other military missions, was that the Kindred did not use suicide bombers. Owen had never believed that, and Kandiss still didn’t, but it had proved true. The Kindred weren’t fanatical enough, or cruel enough, or maybe just plain insane enough to throw away their lives. But things change, and there was nothing like a major plague to change them. These old men could have decided to take out the Terrans who, they might believe, had taken out so many of their own, and to do so by ending lives near their end anyway.

Except that for old men, these looked like a pretty healthy group. Only one rode in a sort of cart behind a bicycle. The rest pedaled away. One reached under a tarp over his gear and Leo trained his rifle on him.

“Hold your fire,” he said to his wrist radio.

The group drew closer.

Then Isabelle, who must have just heard that her sister had returned from Haven, was running down the hill from her lahk to the compound—no, to the men. Damn the woman! She was always where she shouldn’t be… Leo would kill every last one of those geezers if they so much as touched her.

She threw her arms around one and hugged him hard.

Christ on a cracker— Who was that? Who were any of them?

Lu^kaj^ho said over Owen’s radio, now his, “Lieutenant, these be no danger. They be jukno^hal.”

Leo didn’t know the word. “What? Who?”

“They build the ship.”

What ship? Was there a ship being built somewhere? A starship, a sailing ship, what? He needed Isabelle to translate, but Isabelle was down there making a fool of herself. Hugging and laughing. Laughing?

“Berman, send Noah Jenner up here,” he said to Zoe.

“Roger that.”

A few minutes later Jenner ran out of the compound toward the old men. Leo cursed. “Berman, I said to get him up here to translate!”

“I told him. He ran off. Unless I shoot him…”

“Forget it.” Civilians.

The group made its way to the compound. Zoe and Kandiss inspected their bundles. Clothing, food, water, a pet cat.

“Well, sort of a cat, sir,” Kandiss said. “In a cage. Purple.”

Leo lowered his rifle. He didn’t know whether to feel relieved, furious, or foolish. Isabelle left him no room for any of the feelings. She said to him as soon as he’d climbed down from the roof, “I greet you, Leo. Let me introduce you. These are the builders.” She began a long series of names, clicks and inflections, none of which he could remember. Each man said, “I greet you, Leo-mak.”

Even less idea of the chain of command than his unit.

Leo said, “I greet you,” to each of them and then to Isabelle in English, “Who are they? Why are they here?”

“They built the colony ship, almost forty years ago. They know as much about it as can be known. Ful^kaa here”—she pointed to the old man in the cart—“he was the chief engineer and brilliant, I’m told—absolutely brilliant. He heard on the radio that the ship had been recalled, that we had the device to do that, and everything that’s happened since. These men have all left their lahks to help you repair the ship.” She paused and looked levelly at Leo.

“Repair it,” she said, a challenge if he ever heard one, “and use Branch’s reprogramming to send it back to Terra. With anyone who wants to go.”

Three months later, the camp was full again.

This time, they were not protesters or attackers or desperate people seeking vaccinations. This time, they were pilgrims. At least, that was the best word Marianne could find for them, since not even Isabelle seemed able to explain exactly why they came.

“They want to touch the ground where it happened,” was the best Isabelle could do. “It’s not a religious thing, exactly—but isn’t not a religious thing, either. This is where the ship brought the virophage and the ship came from their ancestors—you’ve noticed that most of the pilgrims are young—with the bodies of the colonists on it, and also this is where the virophage came from that saved Kindred. Both those that lost lahk members to R. sporii and those that didn’t come to touch the ship. We touch, you know—the ground, the trees, the rivers. Real, feeling interaction with the ecology is so important.”

But the ship wasn’t part of the ecology. Kindred hadn’t designed it or even built the star drive that made it possible, which was the work of the unknown “master aliens.” And it was the Terran scientists who had saved the planet. Marianne did not point all these things out. If this was Lourdes or Mecca or Stonehenge, then let the pilgrims come. They did no harm, although the “security risk” of their constantly changing presence drove Ranger Kandiss crazy.

Kandiss, not Brodie. Over the three months of people coming and going, of creating and applying materials to repair the ship’s hull, of fluctuating food supplies as harvests suffered from the diminished number of farmers and the loss of the three major cities, Leo Brodie had surprised Marianne with his acceptance of everything, with his calm, with his—there was no other word for it—ability to command.

And now the ship was ready. It had been repaired, cleaned of forty years’ of untended and, in some cases, unintended life-forms. It was stocked with supplies. The last groups of pilgrims were arriving. The ship had finally, according to Terran custom rather than Kindred, been named: the Return . And now decisions had to be made about who was going to Earth and who was staying here.