Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 24

Zack thrust Caitlin into Susan’s arms and pushed himself forward to shield them both. But there were no more gunshots. Caitlin screamed; everyone screamed, it sounded like. The McKays stood near the open internal airlock, and Zack shoved Susan into the stream of panicked people. “Go! Go!”

“Zack—”

“I’ll be all right! Go! Take her to…” The lab might be attacked. Anywhere might be attacked if there was some sort of insane riot against the Awakened. But all at once one of Jenner’s J Squad was there, strong arms opening a passage for Susan.

“I’ve got her, Doctor.”

For one terrible moment, Zack thought: And what if you’re with the gunman? But, no, this was J Squad, Jenner’s personal Praetorian Guard, as Toni called them. Toni—

“Go!” Susan shouted, and he didn’t have to tell her where he needed to go. She knew. Susan always knew him. He let the soldier usher his wife and child to safety as he turned to fight against the crowd, toward the FiVee.

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.

But Jason turned out to be the one who was most vulnerable.

She said, “How badly is he hurt? I want the truth, Lindy.”

“Not very. Of course, surgery is always a risk, but he should be okay. He should have been wearing body armor, but he probably thought it would send the wrong message—Marianne, they shot him! One of his own men! Don’t they know how hard he’s struggled to hold this base together, to do the right thing, even now that… Did you know about this? The birds and the forced exodus?”

Exodus. Biblical. No, not biblical—older than that. What Jason was forcing on Earth was Promethean science, an ambitious experimental enterprise to counteract a major threat, a science which pits potential pay-offs against huge risks. Marianne, who had herself engaged in Promethean science on World, understood.

She said truthfully, “If I had thought about it, I would have known what Jason would do. But I’ve been thinking about something else. Thomas Farouk and I… Lindy, I need to talk to Jason. Can I do that before he goes under anesthesia?”

“No, of course not. What is it? Tell me.”

“I can’t. On second thought, it will wait. It’s already waited a hundred and forty thousand years.”

Lindy stared at her. “Are you okay?”

Was she? Were any of them? “Yes. Just get Jason well. We only have two days.”

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Marianne turned to the sergeant who seemed to always accompany Jason, an older man with bristly gray hair above a face that gave nothing away. Except right now.

“Dr. Jenner, ma’am, I’m Master Sergeant Hillson, Colonel Jenner’s aide. Will he be all right?”

“I’m told that he will be.”

Hillson nodded. “Good. I need to talk to you, ma’am. About the Awakened.”

“What about them?”

“They’re all leaving on the Return,” he said, with no uncertainty. “All of them, no exceptions. Colonel Jenner was going to talk to them to make sure they understand that. He can’t, now. So you have to.”

She considered him. Hillson was going to carry out Jason’s orders even if he, she, and everybody else died doing it. Marianne had barely had time to consider those orders, including what it would mean to return to the alien planet she had left, in her personal time stream, less than three months ago. Three months and twenty-eight years.

“Ma’am?” He was immovable as mountains.

“All right,” she said. “Get all the Awakened together in the conference room.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. It was fortunate that he didn’t salute; she might have tried to slug him. From nerves, from fear, from frustration. When was the last time her life had been under her own control?

Maybe it never had. She no longer knew, not since she and Farouk had worked out their theory.

Twenty-eight.

Jane didn’t need to count how many people had jammed into the conference room. She felt the shape and color of the crowd, and she knew. She felt, too, the colors and shapes of their bafflement, fear, and rage, as well as her own sorrow over leaving Colin.

Twenty-eight people: twenty-five of the thirty who had already awakened. Three parents of v-coma children: Zack McKay, and Fiona and Karl James, whose little boy lay comatose in the infirmary, under guard. The twenty-eight sat on chairs or leaned against the walls, scientists and soldiers and Settlers and a kitchen worker. Facing them, looking determined and exhausted, stood Marianne Jenner. Her determination was jagged-edged and dark blue, and in it Jane felt clearly her resemblance to Jason.

“I am here on behalf of Colonel Jenner, who is in surgery,” Marianne said. “I’m here to listen to all your ideas about leaving Earth. but I need to tell you up front: This is not an undecided debate. We are all going to World. We—no, wait, please, give me a moment to finish—represent too great a threat to Earth. As Colonel Jenner said, if we transmit the virophage to New America, whoever contracts it will gain the same enhanced intelligence that all of you have. They will devise new weapons and new ways to cause destruction, because their intelligence—like yours—will grow along whatever pathways are already prominent in their brains. Those are pathways of aggression and hatred. If you think that Terra is hell now, it is nothing compared to what three or four generations of vicious and narcissistic conquerors can make it. Sadists equipped with the physics of Dr. Farouk, the biology of Dr. Yu’s team. They will—”

“I don’t care!” Karl James shouted. “We’re not leaving Earth! We’ll take our chances here!”

“I’m not going, either,” Toni Steffens said, more quetly but with even more determination. Jane wanted to shrink from the deadly shapes that Dr. Steffens made.

“Marianne, consider,” Toni Steffens continued. “If Earth is going to recover, it needs the intelligence that the Awakened can bring. We can use it to counter New America’s wars, to aid in Earth’s ecological recovery, to return humanity to a viable civilization much more quickly. If intelligence is a weapon, it can also be a force for good. Surely even Colonel Jenner can see that!”

“Yes,” Marianne said, “he can. But it’s a question of risk versus benefit. The risks here outweigh the benefits. And, Karl James, your child was born in Monterey Base and isn’t immune to RSA. How could you stay here with him anyway?”

“Use your so-called super IQ to figure that out instead of kidnapping us!” Karl yelled, and Jane saw that he was past rational argument, beside himself with fear and anger.

For the first time, she saw the use of that strange Terran phrase. Karl James was two shapes in her mind, superimposed on each other: one spiky and the color of blood, the other muddy and puddled as dirty water.

A woman near the back of the room cried, “I’m not going, either!”

Then everyone was talking, voices rising higher and higher with objections, with reasoning, with emotion, with such overwhelming noise that Jane slipped from the room, slightly surprised that the soldiers guarding the door let her go. And then not surprised at all….

It didn’t really matter what was said here. Jane knew what would happen. She’d known it the moment she’d seen the shapes of Marian Jenner. Of Zack McKay, of the two members of J squad who were Awakened. All of them felt like Jason.

The decision had been made.