If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 21

Marianne woke to the sound of wind outside the compound. Not a religious person, nonetheless her first thought was a fervent Thank God! Which god? It didn’t matter. They needed wind.

There had been no wind the day the ship landed. No wind as they counted the dead and buried them. No wind as Isabelle, dry-eyed but clearly only by an effort of will, stumbled through a poem over Salah Bourgiba’s grave. Marianne didn’t know the poem and was surprised that Isabelle did, but Isabelle was endlessly surprising.

It sounded like something Salah might have taught her. Had Isabelle loved Salah? Marianne didn’t think so, even though they had been sleeping together.

The Rangers had not attended Bourgiba’s burial. Mason Kandiss had watched it from his post on the roof. Leo Brodie had had the good sense, or decency, or something—categories were so confused here—to stay inside the compound. What Brodie had done made possible Kindred’s only hope of planetary survival. It had also killed twenty-four people, ten of them children.

Marianne wondered if, circumstances permitting, Brodie would ever visit that other grave in the mountains, the one that Zoe Berman had told her about. Kandiss had dug the grave and scratched the name on the boulder acting as headstone: LT. OWEN RYAN LAMONT.

However, Marianne didn’t give much thought to Lieutenant Lamont. Her mind was full of the virophage.

How much wind? She rose from her pallet and made her way to Big Lab. In the predawn, Lu^kaj^ho stood guard at the east door. She saw with a little shock that he carried not a clumsy Kindred gun but an Army rifle. Leo Brodie’s? Owen Lamont’s?

“I greet you, Dr. Jenner,” he said in lilting English.

“I greet you, Lu^kaj^ho.”

A lot of wind, fresh and cool, in a starlit sky. In this continent slightly south of Kindred’s equator, winds blew east to west. This couldn’t possibly be better. The virophage would be carried across much of the landmass. If, of course, it was actually an airborne pathogen. If there was enough of it. If it could protect humans as well as leelees. If—

Enough.

Somewhere in Big Lab a baby cried, but no one else seemed awake. Marianne knew better—Branch would already be seated at what remained of their equipment, now all crowded into the leelee lab. The young man apparently never slept, no more than the Rangers did.

In the lab, Branch peered through a Kindred microscope.

“They’re too small to see,” Marianne said, although of course Branch knew that. Even the virophage’s host, R. sporii, was too small to see. They needed an electromicrograph, which of course they did not have.

“Look at this,” Branch said, without preamble. He got up to let Marianne at the microscope.

“Branch, there’s wind.”

He smiled. “I heard it. But look at this, Marianne. It’s tissue from the lung of an infected leelee.”

Marianne sat on the stool. As soon as the smoke cleared around the colony ship, Branch had gone inside, heavily masked. He had come out with sacks of leelees, chittering and smelling just as bad as their planet-bound cousins, even as other leelees found their own way out of the ship. Branch had described an interior full of flourishing plants, teeming fungi, and bodies that were nothing but skeletons, all soft tissue having been microscopically consumed by forty years of hothouse microbes. The whole thing, Branch said, had looked like a terrarium from a horror movie, and Marianne had decided that she didn’t need to experience it. They had the leelees.

Branch had set up fans inside the ship to blow infected air out, but that hadn’t been enough. They had needed wind, and now they had it. The incubation period of R. sporii in humans—Terran humans, anyway—was three days, which was how long the spore cloud had been on Kindred. Not that nonscientists could tell that: the cloud was silent, diffuse, invisible. But those infected would fall sick today.

Unless the virophages protected them—completely, partially, or not at all.

This made Branch’s research pointless, even if he’d had the most sophisticated equipment at the CDC. But research was what drove Branch, just as it drove Marianne, and so he was researching. Cultures with cells grown from sacrificed leelees dotted the room.

The image in the microscope showed three intact lung cells and parts of two others. Somewhere in each cell, too tiny to be seen, was R. sporii, and somewhere inside that was the virophage. The cells looked normal.

“You showed me this before,” Marianne said. “It just shows that the leelees aren’t infected.”

“It shows their lungs aren’t infected with Avenger. Now—”

“Wait—what did you just call the virophage?”

“Avenger. Well, I have to refer to it as something. The first virophage ever discovered was called Sputnik!”

“I know,” Marianne said. Sputnik was Russian for “fellow traveler,” and the researchers who discovered it had an unfortunate penchant for whimsy.

“Anyway, now look at this. They’re neurons from an infected leelee’s brain, from the area that seems to correspond roughly to Terran mammals’ cerebellum.” He removed the slide from the microscope and replaced it with another. “I stained them to emphasize receptors.”

Marianne peered into the ’scope. Four neurons—Branch had always prepared outstanding slides—and none of them looked like the cerebellum neurons of leelees sacrificed from Kindred. There were more axons and more receptors, bristly outgrowths that made the cells look like particularly dense hedgehogs.

She said, “I’m a geneticist, not a neurologist, but that looks like a lot more going on in the leelee brain than in the leelees we’re familiar with.” She glanced at a cage of live leelees, chittering and stinking. “Have you observed any behavioral differences in the ones you captured from the ship?”

“Nothing. And of course there’s no reason to think the virophage is responsible, but still… That’s an awful lot of evolution to have occurred in forty years without some unusual trigger.”

Marianne stood. “If it is evolution. If it is due to the virophage. But it doesn’t matter right now. The only thing that matters right now is the effect the virophage has on R. Sporii in the human body.”

“I know,” Branch said. “But… still… if only I had a gene sequencer and electromicrograph!”

Three days later, in midafternoon, the first Kindred died of R. sporii.

It was an adolescent boy in the camp. Marianne never knew his name. The compound had no doctor now, and when a young girl came running across the perimeter for help, Marianne had none to give. Noah went back with the girl, returning to the compound a half hour later. He looked dazed.

“It happens so fast,” he said.

“I know,” Marianne said. She had seen it on Terra: adult respiratory distress syndrome, a catchall diagnosis. Gasps for air as lung tissue became heavier and heavier with fluid seeping into the lungs. Each breath required more and more effort. An X-ray of lung tissue—if they had that equipment here—would show “whiteout”—so much fluid in the lungs increasing the radiological density that the image looked like a snowstorm.

Noah clutched at Marianne’s arm as if he were a child again and she, his mother, could fix anything wrong. But she couldn’t, and in a moment he dropped her arm.

Marianne scanned the horizon. Trees waved gracefully in a west–east wind. Would this poor boy’s death be an isolated case? An outlier or a harbinger?

Science always proceeded by trial and error, by living with doubt, by refusing to grab prematurely onto certainty. But this was a huge trial, a massive amount of doubt, and devoid of any certainty at all.

Wailing rose from the camp.

Zoe Berman, in full gear, approached Marianne and Noah. “Go inside now,” she said, eyes on the camp, “just in case. Lieutenant Brodie’s orders.”

And just who had given Brodie that field promotion? Marianne didn’t ask. The military unit, grown ever larger with Kindred recruits, was something she didn’t understand, nor want to. With a final glance at the camp, the blowing trees, the clear sky, she went inside.

It was going to be a long day, an even longer night, and no one would sleep.

Isabelle stood in the doorway of the ready room, a child in her arms. At least the kid wasn’t crying, Leo thought. And it was alive, unlike the children who had died when he fired on the ship. That had been necessary, but he knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life. Awake, asleep, in dreams. Maybe someday he could talk about it with somebody—Isabelle?—but not now. He said, “Any more deaths?”

“No. And according to the radio, the spore cloud hit days ago ago.”

Leo nodded. He hated not being out there with his peacekeeping force, but Dr. Jenner had told him that if he did any more climbing around, he would tear open his stitches and die. Leo didn’t know if this was true and he suspected she didn’t know, either, but it worked okay for him to direct the mission from the ready room. He got reports about the camp from Lu^kaj^ho’s infiltrators, about any external threats from Kandiss and Zoe, about the vaccinated kids inside the compound from Isabelle, about radio reports from Isabelle and Noah Jenner, the only two left who were fluent in both Kindred and English now that Salah Bourgiba was dead.

Did Isabelle mourn him? She looked heavy-eyed and limp, but everybody looked that way. Waiting, not war, was the real hell.

He said, “Well, that’s good, right? Maybe the virophage worked. At least in the camp.”

“Maybe.” The child whimpered and she shifted it in her arms. Isabelle looked good with the dark-haired, copper-skinned baby. If she married a Kindred, her child would look more like Lily, a mix. But Isabelle hadn’t married any of the Kindred men.

She said, in an attempt at lightheartedness, “‘Lieutenant’?”

“Lu^kaj^ho started that shit,” Leo said, with disgust. “I think because Owen was called that, he assumes it’s a title for whoever is CO. Then Zoe did it, one of her twisted jokes. Only Kandiss has the sense to ignore it.”

“It’s not a joke, Leo. Your unit wants you to be lieutenant.”

“Yeah, but the US Army back home has other ideas.”

“Are you going back home, Leo? If it becomes possible?”

So they’d arrived here. Already. It took Leo by surprise—the timing did, anyway. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t, in the long stretches of sitting here on his pallet, thought about it.

He looked her straight in the eyes. “I don’t know, Isabelle—am I? Going back to Terra?”

But whatever he’d hoped to see—some sign, some plea—wasn’t there. However, it wasn’t not there, either, a maddening state of push-pull. If Isabelle had been a different woman, he’d have thought she was jerking him around. But he knew she wasn’t.

All right, then—let’s do this. He said, “Did you love him?”

She didn’t play any games about pretending not to understand. “No.”

He digested this: the speed and firmness with which she answered. He said slowly, “A lot depends on what happens with the cloud. If the virophage doesn’t work and everybody dies, and if it’s possible to reprogram the ship, will you go back to Terra?”

“I don’t know. If the virophage does work, or partially works, and there is still a civilization here to rebuild—will you stay on Kindred and help build it?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “I’m in the Army, you know.”

She grimaced. They both knew that too many Army regulations had already been jettisoned. And what did he face if he went back to Terra? Court-martial?

He said, stalling, “You know these people a lot better than I do—is there going to be what Tony Schrupp says, rioting and looting and a general breakdown?”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle said, “but I don’t think so. You know what, Leo—I think we all see the world mostly like we are inside. Tony was always a suspicious grabber, and so he’s suspicious about grabbing. That’s why he built Haven. Marianne has always put her faith in science, and she still does. And you were always a leader underneath, making your own judgments, and so now you can lead the unit.”

“You don’t know me, Isabelle. I was no leader.”

“Maybe you were and didn’t know it. We might need an army, Leo. We never did before, but before there was enough to go around easily, with very old laws and customs and such. If all that goes, things might be more disrupted. Humans aren’t naturally peaceful. We’re biologically hierarchical and territorial. Only abundance, a monoculture, and intense indoctrination kept us so peaceful for so long.”

The stilted words sounded like Salah Bourgiba, the intellectual. Maybe it was all true—actually, it was what Leo himself believed, just not in such fancy words—but he still felt a flash of jealousy that she was using Bourgiba’s phrases.

Heemur^ka appeared in the doorway and spoke in rapid Kindred. Leo felt his adrenaline jump-start. But then Isabelle translated.

“He says no more deaths in the camp, no planned violence. People are waiting to see what happens with the spore cloud.”

“Which means that if more people die, there could be trouble. Here’s what I want you to tell him.” Leo laid out the operation orders in case of attack, and everything else went on the back burner.

For now.

Austin woke with a start. He had struggled to stay awake all night, to hear everything, but sleep had grabbed him without his even feeling it, and now it was morning.! Shit!

The radio in Big Lab still received broadcasts. Noah sat on a cushion near it, a cup of nakl in his hands, leaning toward the radio to shut out the noise of fussing little kids and a wailing baby.

“Noah-kal—what news?”

“One more death in the camp, and other places are reporting only a few so far. That means that either the virophage mostly worked or—”

“I know what it means,” Austin snapped. When were they going to stop treating him like a little kid? He stalked to the piss closet, then the showers. When he was clean, he listened to the radio for an hour before going outside. The sun was well over the horizon, and the wind blew.

Ranger Berman was on roof duty, with two of Leo’s peacekeepers on the ground. “I greet you, Private Heemur^ka.”

“I greet you, Austin.”

“I greet—What’s that?” He was the first to spot it, a figure trudging over the horizon toward the compound, carrying something big. A second later he heard Ranger Berman on her wrister, although he couldn’t distinguish the words.

The figure plodded closer. Another few minutes, and Austin was sure. “It’s Claire!” He took off running before anyone could stop him.

She was dirty, tired, and angry. “Austin. You. The least you can do is help me—here, carry this!” She thrust at him a big piece of equipment. He recognized it. It was heavy.

“How did you escape? And how did you get this through the crawl tunnel?”

“I didn’t and I didn’t.” Then she softened a little. “Graa^lok let me go, with this.”

“Graa^lok?”

“Tony has a radio, you know. He—”

“I know he has a radio! I’m the one who brought it there!”

“Good for you. They’ve all heard that the virophage has kept deaths from R. sporii to a very few, relatively. Graa^lok understands the science, at least after I explained it to him. He believed me, unlike that moron Tony, and Graa^lok felt bad about my abduction. As you should, too! In the middle of the night, he smuggled me out the third entrance to Haven and let me take this. That entrance is a lot bigger.”

Bigger! That meant that all Austin’s dismantling of supplies, crawling with them through the tunnel, getting scraped and bruised—all had been unnecessary. There was another, bigger entrance that Tony never showed him.

“But Graa^lok contaminated Haven with—”

“There’s an airlock. A real one. Beyon is a good physicist, I’ll give him that, and Graa^lok a good engineer.”

“But Tony will kill Graa^lok for letting you go!”

“Austin,” Claire said, “I’m not going to stand here arguing what Graa^lok did or what Tony will do or anything else. Now carry that thing, and start to make up for all the trouble you caused.”

She walked forward and Austin had to follow. She didn’t seem to understand that he was really a hero.

More deaths from the spore cloud were being reported on the radio. Isabelle and Noah plotted them on a map that Noah drew of the continent. Marianne and Claire studied the map. The pattern was clear.

No one else had died in the camp. The farther east you went, the more deaths. Most clustered on the east coast, beyond a mountain range that blocked wind, and to the far north, where the land was rockier and less fertile. Mostly herders lived there, with some fishermen and scientific outposts. Those fared the worst. The map was almost a perfect epidemiologic match to the wind direction and strength.

The virophage had saved millions of lives, without causing sickness in humans. It was a miracle. It was scientific triumph. It was evolution in practice, and sometimes, Marianne thought, evolution was on your side. Sometimes.

“About one-twenty-fifth of the population is gone,” Isabelle said, “four out of every hundred. That’s still enough, along with the Russian attacks, to cause major disruption in how everything functions.”

“But maybe not enough to cause collapse,” Noah said. He held Lily in his arms, and Marianne saw all over again how much her son loved this planet and his life here. He added, more somberly, “Apparently there are groups that still blame Terrans for everything, including the spore cloud.”

As there were on Earth. Marianne didn’t want to think too much about the past. She turned away from the discussion and to her work.

Claire Patel had brought a gene-sequencer from Haven. Zoe Berman and Mason Kandiss had taken some convincing that the sequencer wasn’t a bomb in disguise, but Leo Brodie was in charge and he explained to the unit what it was. Marianne would like to have heard that explanation; what Leo knew about science would fit on a thumbnail, in a large font. But he wasn’t stupid, Marianne had to give him that.

The gene sequencer was Terran, brought to Kindred ten years ago. Old, cranky, outdated, but running. Marianne and Branch obtained a virophage sample from dead spores—not an easy task, in itself—and sequenced its genome.

The genome was tiny, only twelve-thousand base pairs making up eighteen genes. Eight of them were completely unknown to the database on Marianne’s laptop. Five of them corresponded to known genes for RNA viruses. The other five were also known: they were exact duplicates of genes in R. sporii.

So this was not the first time the two viruses had encountered each other. Somewhere in the unimaginably distant past, spore cloud and virophage had met. The virophage had raided its host’s genome, as microbes did all the time. The virophage could even be a genetic “mule,” carrying genes between many viruses on planets, on asteroids and comets, in the drifting cold of space. Virophages stole from viruses, modified viruses, destroyed viruses, and viruses did the same to each other. Marianne realized yet again she was looking at the very oldest form of evolution—a jump through time that made the time dilation between Terra and Kindred completely irrelevant. This was the real, fundamental battle, and it would outlast every other form of life.

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.”