Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

It was like trying to pole upstream in rapids, but he got there. Jenner, surrounded by grim soldiers, lay on the ground. Holbrook bent over him—or at least Zack thought he did. Jenner was not Zack’s goal.

Toni stood in a narrow passage between the FiVee and the armory wall. A soldier on the vehicle roof pointed his rifle at Zack, whose heart stopped. But then the soldier recognized him and nodded. Zack slipped behind the truck.

“Toni! You all right?”

“Nicole? Will they attack the infirmary? Will they—”

“Jenner’s men seem to have it under control. They took Susan and Caity to safety, they’ll protect everybody at risk… are you okay?”

“Yes. Jenner?”

“I don’t know.”

She said, “I was on the cab to answer questions, and then he fell and I jumped back here. I saw J Squad take down the gunman but I didn’t see any more. I think he might have acted alone.”

Relief flooded Zack, even though Toni could be mistaken; what did she know about the mood of Monterey Base? This was her first time out of the lab since she’d awakened. The lab…

“Toni— why ? The birds—”

“Jenner told you why he released them. He’s right.”

Words that, coming from Toni, were almost as shocking as Jenner’s own. Her deep brown eyes caught and held his.

“Zack, he was right to release the birds. We were right.”

“The whole ecology will be wrecked!”

“Changed, not wrecked.”

“Wrecked. At least, in the short run.”

“We were thinking long run,” Toni said, and from her tone, Zack knew that the subject was closed. He knew, too, that Jenner’s plan would be rammed through, even if Jenner himself was dead. Major Duncan and J Squad and whoever else Jenner had brought into his strategy would make sure of that. The gene-drive birds had been released; the domes with remaining virophage spores would be nuked; the Awakened, if no one else, would go aboard the Return to the stars.

Wherever Susan and Caitlin went, Zack would go, too.

His breath caught at the thought. A spaceship, a new planet, they would have to have all their microbes changed, what did he remember about World, a K-something orange dwarf star…

Toni said, “I’m going to find out if the colonel is dead.”

And an alliance, however temporary, between Toni Steffens and Colonel Jason Jenner, US Army. That might be the strangest thing of all.

When there was no more gunfire after the first shot, panic subsided a little. Soldiers funneled everyone out of the armory. As the crowd thinned, Jane looked for Colin. Two soldiers had pushed Jane, her father, La^vor, and Belok^ into a corner and stood in front of them, guns raised, to protect them. But no one tried to hurt them, and when the armory was almost empty, Jane said to the back of one of her protectors, “Can I go now?”

The soldier turned. Through the faceplate of her helmet, the woman looked middle-aged, which still felt so strange to Jane. On World, she would be a Mother. The soldier nodded.

“Stay here, please,” Jane said to the others, and slid past her protectors. At the far end of the armory another line of armed soldiers stood in front of the huddle around Jason. Ryan was among them, and Colin’s powerchair. Jane caught a glimpse of Colin’s face and knew, from the Colin-patterns in her mind, that Jason was not dead.

Colin looked up at her. “I saw the military guarding you… but Jason…”

“How bad is it?” Jane knelt by his chair, felt his outrage in her mind and bones and heart.

“He’ll live. The fucker hit his chest but Holbrook said he missed everything vital. Oh, Jane—”

She knelt by his chair. “Do you need to stay with him? Or with your father?”

Colin glanced at the huddle. The press of bodies had shifted, and now Jane could see Lindy bending over Jason. She, not Holbrook, was injecting something into the colonel. A nurse came through the airlock wheeling a gurney. Jason’s eyes were open; he said something to Lindy that Jane couldn’t hear. Blood stained the entire front of his uniform.

Colin said, “I can go. But the soldiers—”

He hadn’t even finished his sentence when the middle-aged female soldier appeared beside them and said, “This way, ma’am.” The other guard was leading Ka^graa, Belok^, and La^vor.

Jane said, “Colin, too.”

“All right.”

She took them out of the armory and to the secure quarters where all the Awakened slept. Jane crowded into Colin’s room beside his chair and closed the door. He said, “Did you know?”

“About the birds? No.”

“I don’t know what Jason tells you.”

“Jason and I don’t talk,” Jane said. She felt grief pressing in on him, jagged pieces, sharp as scalpels, and knew that not all the grief was for the ecology.

She said, “We have two days.”

His eyes filled with tears. Like the men on World, Colin was not afraid to cry. He said, “You know, then.”

“That you must stay here? Yes. And I must go.”

“I want to be with you. But Earth is going to need people who are not New America. Who are not military, not killers, not destructive, not…”

She took his hand. “Colin, I want to say something. I have been thinking about this. It is possible to want a thing too much. Even a good thing. Wanting it too much makes you rush after it, chase it hard. And then, like anything being chased, it runs away.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

Jane struggled to find words. The pattern, so clear in her mind, was wordless, and this was not her language. But nothing had ever been so important to communicate.

“You want Mother Terra, as we have Mother World. But let Her come to you. And if She comes with some technology necessary to keep you alive, let Her. You don’t have to grab technology, like Monterey Base does, but you don’t have to push it away, either. Just receive it, as a gift.”

“I want to live without tech, free with nature.”

Jane said slowly, “Nature is not free. Or pure.”

“Jane—”

“Don’t be disappointed in me, Colin. Just listen. I have been practicing reading English. In the library. Do you know what ‘kintsugi’ is?”

“No.” His face wore a stubborn look, and Jane saw the resemblance to his brother, and to his grandmother.

She said, “It is from an art in a place called ‘Japan.’ They made earthenware pots, like ours on World. Sometimes the pots break in the firing of them. Then kintsugi comes. It means to stick the fragments of broken pots together with a golden lacquer, to make something even more beautiful because it was broken and mended.”

There was a long silence. Then Colin said, “I love you.”

“I know,” Jane said, and felt that knowledge, too, as patterns in her mind, full of sorrow and joy and the weight of two planets.

She crawled onto his lap, careful of his injured leg, and held him.

Marianne and Ryan walked beside Jason’s gurney, with Lindy on the other side. Orderlies wheeled it from the armory to the OR. Soldiers, and no one else, filled the corridors along the way. Dr. Holbrook had gone ahead to scrub. The bullet was still in Jason and had to come out.

Just before Jason disappeared into the OR, Lindy stooped and kissed his lips. Jason’s eyes were closed, but Marianne watched his mouth form a brief curve.

She had always thought of Colin as the fragile one. Colin was the one who’d had a ruptured spleen from a schoolyard bully. Who had had to learn to compensate for the superhearing that for the first three years of his little life had tormented him and made him cry constantly. Who had sobbed over the deaths of countless pet gerbils. Who’d carefully watered every plant that he heard “clicking” from dryness. Who had tried to found a quixotic, impossible way of living in harmony with nature.