If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 8

Leo, in full kit and with his rifle in hand, walked compound patrol. That’s what they were calling it, the two buildings now connected by a covered walkway: “the compound.” One building, the “Big Lab,” had been a school and the “Little Lab” had been the clinic, but now they were collectively the compound and the squad was securing it. Owen had the whole thing built in less than a week. Kindred workmen from the little town did anything he said, they were that eager to have the scientists find a vaccine against spore disease. They’d then cleared a hundred-foot bare perimeter around the east, west, and south sides of the compound.

There were three doors, to the south, east, and north. The north door, which faced away from the town and toward open fields backed by distant mountains, had sparked intense arguments between Owen and Isabelle. That side of the clinic held a big vegetable and herb garden circled by a shoulder-high wall to keep animals from eating the vegetables. Owen had wanted the wall torn down. Isabelle had fought for wall and vegetables, and had won: “How do you suppose we’ll feed you, Lieutenant? You’re posting a soldier on the roof during each watch anyway—surely they can manage to see anything that approached over all that open grazing land to the north?”

Owen also had built a ready room on one side of the compound, made of triple-reinforced karthwood and stone, with doors opening both into Big Lab and out to the perimeter. The four of them slept there, one six-hour off-duty each day. Actually, it was six hours and eighteen minutes, since the day here was longer than on Terra. Leo would take any extra eighteen minutes of sleep that he could get. The ready room held four metal cabinets brought from the clinic, each with a lock. Owen, Kandiss, Zoe, and Leo kept their weapons there, separately—“The better to foil thieves,” Owen said. “Four locks are harder to crack than one.” Since the only people with any way of getting into the ready room were the scientists inside the compound, the lockers struck Leo as one more example of Owen’s military caution. Or his general suspiciousness of Kindred. Depending on how you looked at it.

Owen had put together an OPORD with all the mission-essential elements: assessment, capabilities, civilian considerations, possible courses of action. Leo didn’t know everything in Owen’s mind, but at least he understood patrol. Like today, his often took place during the daily afternoon rain, which was also the daily siesta time, although not for the Rangers. Leo didn’t mind rain; he’d been deployed to Brazil during the food riots.

Beyond the perimeter lay the refugee camp, which Leo also circled in his patrol. It wasn’t properly a refugee camp; these people all had homes somewhere else. They were camped here to wait for vaccines. They had no guns, no IEDs, no grenades, no weapons of any kind. And in the past two weeks, the only Kindred who had ventured onto the bare perimeter was a child, whose mother pulled her back with smiles and what sounded like babbled apologies.

Leo didn’t understand the camp. In Brazil, the refugee camps had been violent places, with fights over food, over places to put tents, over soccer balls, over name-calling. None of that here. Food and water came in on carts every day. Privies were cleaned. Sections of the river were set aside for bathing and washing clothes, apparently on some sort of schedule that everyone respected. Everybody was polite all the time, sharing and helping and keeping their kids in line. Not that many kids, either—apparently every person only got one “tallied” to him or her, and then the mother’s brother was responsible for raising the kids, who lived in their mothers’ lahks. Crazy. Even crazier was that people didn’t seem to mind that much government control over their personal affairs. Nobody in Tennessee would have stood for it, not for a minute.

“They’re polite now,” Owen had said. “There’s no vaccine to fight over yet.”

Well, that made sense, sort of. Maybe when the spore cloud got closer and if there wasn’t enough vaccine to go around—

“There won’t be enough,” Owen had said. “It’s six weeks off. When this place pops, we take out anybody rushing the compound. They will. There are males of fighting age there, plenty of them, and they’ll get desperate.”

The unit had all nodded, but something about the way Owen had said it bothered Leo. Under that Ranger calm was a kind of what—eagerness to start shooting? Well, nothing wrong with that—Rangers always found battle more exciting than waiting, they were trained for active missions. Still—

The rain started—you could set your watch by it—and the old people covered their cook fires and went into their tents. Leo spoke to Zoe, on watch duty on the compound roof, over the private radio frequency they had set up. “Zo—what are the refugee tents made of?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Well, they don’t make plastics. Not good for the environment. So it must be something else, maybe cloth treated with some pine resin or something. See anything from up there?”

“If I did, don’t you think I’d of already told you?”

This was inarguable. Leo said, “I’m going in now.”

“Roger that.”

His breath quickened; this was the only part of patrol that wasn’t exquisitely boring. He nodded to Kandiss, on duty at the compound entrance. At any given time, three of the four of them were on duty and one was asleep. Owen always took night duty. Leo walked inside to begin his check on the interior rooms.

Rough walls had been erected in the Big Lab, which before must have been just one open room—how the hell did any kids learn anything? Well, they must have. The place swarmed with Kindred scientists. Branch Carter was explaining something to a bunch of them, but the translator was Noah Jenner, not Isabelle. There were machines and objects Leo didn’t understand, but everything looked okay. Mostly he was ignored, but Dr. Patel gave him a quick smile. Dr. Bourgiba did not.

He took the covered walkway from the Big Lab to the clinic. No sick people in it now, unless you counted Marianne Jenner, who wasn’t exactly sick but wasn’t well, either. She spent a lot of time sitting up in bed, helping other scientists understand stuff on her computer. The rest of the time she was doing experiments with leelees.

As soon as Leo opened the door that connected the clinic part of the compound to the covered walkway, the leelee smell made his nose wrinkle. Inside the leelee lab, it was far worse. The small space was crowded with stacked cages, benches with equipment, and a big locked metal cabinet like the weapons lockers in the squad’s ready room. The vaccines, Leo knew, were kept in there.

Two Kindred kids were supposed to keep the cages clean, Isabelle’s nephew Austin and a fat kid called Graylock who spoke pretty good English, but either they weren’t doing their jobs well or else leelees smelled like that even in clean cages. Not putrid or anything—nothing near as bad as the camps in Brazil—but sort of sour, like milk going bad. And the weird little animals chittered all the time, like insects. Dr. Jenner had told Leo that the leelees were a lot like mice, but Leo couldn’t see it. Smaller than mice, the creatures were furless, short-tailed, with round purplish bodies. Part of their energy came from photosynthesis, part from eating.

“They look like skittery plums,” Leo had said.

Dr. Jenner had smiled. “I meant their genomes. They’re the closest mammals here to human genomic structure.”

That was beyond Leo’s pay grade, so he’d just nodded and filed the information away. Maybe it would give him something to talk to Isabelle about.

She stood on what was left of the floor space between Dr. Jenner and two Kindred scientists. Automatically Leo scanned the men for weapons (where? They just wore those brief pale-colored dresses) and the room for dangers, but everything looked clean. Dr. Jenner was showing the men how to do something to a leelee, and Isabelle was translating. Leo’s heart skipped a beat.

She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, not like Zoe and little Dr. Patel were beautiful, but everything about her appealed to him. Leo knew he was good-looking—enough girls had told him so—and usually he was good with women, talking easily to them and flirting and, if he wanted to, getting them into bed. Isabelle was different. He felt tongue-tied around her, maybe because she was older than he was, and she treated him like… what? A friend. Not a friend like Zoe, who understood Leo’s world because it was her world as well, but like the friend-of-a-friend whom you might respect but thought you had zero in common with. Like that.

Dr. Jenner said to Leo, “Everything’s good here, Ranger.”

He didn’t correct her. Her attention had moved back to the leelee, and anyway nobody on Kindred cared about the distinction between the Seventy-Fifth and the US Army. To the Kindred, the squad were all Rangers.

Leo checked the rest of the clinic, the locks on the two outer doors, one in the kitchen and one in what had been the lobby and was now filled with lab benches. He was halfway along the walkway to the Big Lab when a woman screamed.

Three seconds to reach the Big Lab. A Kindred stood there with his arm around the neck of Branch Carter. In the Kindred’s hand was what Leo recognized instantly as a homemade pipe gun, pointed at Branch. The Kindred was shouting something in his own language, and people poured from the surrounding makeshift labs and sleeping cubicles to stand, hands pressed to their mouths and wide eyes wider, at the edges of the room.

All at once they looked alien to Leo: long spindly insect arms and legs, big dark reptilian eyes. All of them, not just the intruder holding the skinny human a foot shorter than he was.

The intruder could fire the weapon. The gun could—probably would—blow up, wounding or killing both him and Carter. Leo could drop him—his sidearm was already in his hand—but the impact might set off the homemade gun…. homemade? The thing looked pretty finished.

His thoughts were almost simultaneous. Adrenaline coursed through him. The Kindred was still shouting. Now Leo caught the one Terran word, hard to decipher in that accent: vaccine. The fucker wanted some of the precious vaccine. What did he think, that he could just waltz in here, be given a syringe, and stroll out?

Leo heard his own voice saying calmly, “Give him something he can think is vaccine.”

No one moved. No one understood his English. Then Dr. Patel stepped forward, something in her hand. Behind him he heard another voice, speaking Kindred loudly: Isabelle.

Claire Patel walked up to the Kindred and held out her hand. A syringe lay on her palm. The intruder, holding the gun and Carter, had no hands left to take it. Dr. Patel smiled; only the throbbing of her temples gave away her fear—and approached the intruder. No one else, maybe, could have done it; Dr. Patel, weighing maybe ninety pounds, looked as threatening as a child. She put the syringe into a pocket of the intruder’s wrap.

Isabelle continued to talk in Kindred. Leo would have given anything to know what she was saying. Leo would have to make a decision soon; the fucker was backing away, toward the door, his arm tightening around Carter’s neck. No way Leo could let them get out of here.

The man shouted something back at Isabelle and kept moving.

Leo said, “Isabelle, tell everyone to get behind doors. Now.”

She did. A small part of Leo’s mind was astonished at how quickly and completely lab personnel followed directions. He’d seen platoons less disciplined.

Then—yes. Leo caught the movement before anyone else did. Carter—because he was choking or because he was being taken away, flailed in the intruder’s grasp. For a fraction of a second, the intruder’s body was exposed. Leo fired.

His bullet hit exactly where he intended: the left knee. The intruder screamed, let go of Carter, and fell to the floor. The gun did not explode; it skittered across the floor and came to rest against a closed door. Leo was on the intruder, and it was all over.

“How the fuck did this happen?” Owen demanded.

The unit stood at attention in front of him. The homemade pipe gun, disassembled, lay on a piece of cloth at his feet. He glanced at it in disgust, although it was clear the thing didn’t merit disgust. Made from two pieces of steel pipe, with a wooden dowel and nail making up the firing pin, the gun resembled the Philippine guerilla gun, utilizing blow forward action. Leo had seen such guns in Brazil. But this was a much sleeker version; the pipes had been sanded so that the barrel slid perfectly inside the receiver. The stock had a wooden block in front of the end cap so that if the receiver end threads failed, the end cap would not be blown into the user’s face. The stock was smooth, with some sort of material acting as grip.

The problem with all these pipe guns was that you got only one shot—after firing, the barrel had to be removed and the spent shell pulled out by hand. That hadn’t seemed to deter the attacker, who was now being treated by Dr. Bourgiba and questioned by Noah Jenner.

“Brodie,” Owen said, “where were you?”

“On interior patrol, sir. In the walkway between buildings.” Owen already knew this. “Permission to speak, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“There aren’t enough of us, sir. We can’t cover everything. And if one Kindred could make this weapon, then a lot of them can.”

“Do you think I don’t know that, Brodie? Is that what you think?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m glad you don’t think that. Because I know this will happen again. I know there aren’t enough of us to secure this facility adequately. I also know this should not have been allowed to happen. Berman, why didn’t you observe the Kinnie from the roof?”

Kinnie. Leo hadn’t heard the word before. They way Owen said it, it sounded ugly. Brassie. Towelhead. Gook. Jap. Chink.

Zoe said, “No answer, sir, except that he might coulda crossed the perimeter to the south, while I was watching what looked like suspicious movement in the east outer edge of the camp, sir. Kandiss went to check it out.”

“What kind of suspicious movement?”

“Males of fighting age moving in, like… coulda been drills.”

“Armed?”

“Not that I could see.”

A diversion? If some group in the camp was that organized, the squad was in trouble. Three soldiers awake at one time… not enough.

“Kandiss, where were you? Did you see this ‘drilling’?”

“No, sir.”

Zoe said, “Sir, they’d stopped by the time Kandiss reached that section of the perimeter.”

“And you—any of you—have never seen any more of these weapons, or anything resembling them? Or anything else that can be construed as a weapon? Molotovs, IEDs, anything?”

Three no-sirs.

Brodie said, “Permission to speak, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“We need more eyes, sir, as you said. We should start training Kindred to supplement patrols.”

Something moved behind Owen’s eyes. “Because that worked out so well in Brazil, right, Corporal Brodie? At, for instance, Brasília?”

Leo was silent. He hadn’t been at Brasilia, but he knew all about it, as did everyone in the entire world. Fourteen US-trained and armed insurgents had—all fourteen of them—been infiltrators. They had slaughtered fifteen Marines who had trained and trusted them, and then an entire village of women and children.

Owen said, “We aren’t arming Kinnies any more than they’re doing themselves. Christ, all that propaganda about how these are genetically and socially peaceful people…”

Leo blinked. “Genetically and socially peaceful”? Not the sort of language that found its way into any debriefing he’d ever been in. Well, Owen was smart and college-educated.

And the Kindred, whatever they were genetically and socially, were human. Humans got desperate.

Owen said, “From now on, standing orders are twenty-hour duty shifts. Roof watcher reports anything suspicious directly and immediately to me. No more fuck-ups. Another Kinnie gets inside, and the fuck-up is facing court-martial when we get back home. Got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

Back home? Did Owen still think that was happening? How?

“Dismissed,” Owen said.

Leo bent to once again examine the parts of the pipe gun. There could be a whole factory making these somewhere—except, wouldn’t the Mothers object? And what had the Kinnie been shouting before Leo dropped him? Maybe Leo better start learning the language.

He’d picked up a fair amount of Portuguese on duty in Brazil. He didn’t have the kind of language ability that Dr. Bourgiba did, and opportunity to study was limited because they were going to stand twenty-hour duty shifts, but you could learn a lot just keeping your eyes and ears open. And—wait!

Maybe he could ask Isabelle to teach him. Half an hour, fifteen minutes carved from his sleep time… yes.

Two hours later, a dirigible floated toward the camp. Kandiss, on roof watch, used the squad frequency to detail its landing a mile away from the lab. Then he said, “Okay, a… a procession coming toward us.”

Owen’s voice, sharp on the radio frequency: “What kind of procession?”

“It looks like… four men carrying a platform on poles. Canopy, open sides… woman lying inside.”

“A body? Dead?”

“No, sir. Really old. Not headed here, swerved toward Noah Jenner’s house on the hill.”

Where the Terran lahk lives, Leo thought, and then corrected himself: lived. Nobody was left in the beautiful karthwood house except Isabelle’s sister and her kid, Austin. Jenner and Isabelle had moved into the compound; the McGuire brothers had returned to their “manufacturies” in the central mountains; nobody seemed to know where the other two males, Schrupp and Beyon, lived now. Or, if they did know, they hadn’t told Leo. Well, that had been typical of most of the foster families Leo had grown up in: people moved away, leaving no forwarding address. No biggie.

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.

Isabelle said, “I tried to volunteer for the Army. They wouldn’t take me.”

“Why not?”

“Heart murmur.”

Instantly he was again a physician. “What are the details? Did you get a prognosis?”

She chuckled, a low sound that, to his surprise, went straight to his groin. “Easy, Doctor. It’s nothing fatal. But the Army didn’t want me.”

But I do. Salah suddenly felt wary: of her, of himself. He stood. “I think I’ll make one more tour of the labs. Check on Marianne, and make sure nobody has caught some weird Kindred disease.”

“We call it ‘World,’ you know. Not ‘Kindred.’”

“I know.”

He made his way from the courtyard into Big Lab, which hummed with urgent, organized activity. Claire gave him a tired smile. Marianne Jenner was asleep, looking wan. Two more heroic women. This place abounded with them. Of course, there was also Kayla.

“World,” not “Kindred.” He would have to remember. In the walkway from the clinic to the Big Lab, he passed two World scientists, tall coppery men with big dark eyes, chattering to each other. Each said, “I greet you, Salah-mak.”

“I greet you, Beela¡. I greet you, Kal^cho.” He wished they would not address him by the honorific for a superior. He was a stranger here.

I love it here, Isabelle had said.

He was a stranger who probably would have to stay forever on World. Or what was left of it, after.