Bourgiba was silent.
“I thought so. This place doesn’t work that way, now. This is a peaceful place, now.” He pulled on his boots. “But just in case it starts to work that way when things break down, we’re going to be ready.”
It was two weeks before Marianne was able to sit up in bed. She knew she’d nearly died. All her life she’d read accounts of people who’d survived plane crashes, cancer treatments, house fires. Every single one had said that, afterward, their appreciation of small things had deepened into gratitude for the glory of life.
She was really irritated that it was true.
The hard platform bed felt wonderful under her; the fruit she was brought to eat in small nibbles tasted better than any fruit she’d ever had; the karthwood of her clinic room gleamed like burnished gold. Sweet, faintly spicy air smelling of rain drifted through a small screened window. She was marooned on a planet about to undergo the death throes of its civilization, and she had never felt so alive.
Had Harrison Rice, her last romantic partner, felt this way in the brief time between his diagnosis and death? He hadn’t said so. Stoic and detached, Harrison had kept his feelings to himself. But it had been his death that decided Marianne to come to Kindred and see Noah one last time. So complicated, the threads that mortality spun in human minds.
“Mom,” Noah said—this strange Noah with deep coppery skin and huge eyes, surgically altered—“are you well enough to meet your granddaughter?”
Something clutched in Marianne’s heart. “Yes!”
They came a few minutes later: Llaa^moh¡, whom Marianne had known as “Officer Jones” on Terra, with a thin child by the hand. “I greet you, mother-of-my-husband,” Llaa^moh¡ said in heavily accented English. “This is Lil^da. Lily.’”
The child said, “I greet you, Grandmother,” carefully shaping each of the English syllables, bravely lifting her eyes, as big and dark as her mother’s, to Marianne’s. A shy child, Marianne saw, unlike the two grandsons she had left on Terra. The grandsons she would never see again—no, don’t think of that, this was Lily’s moment.
Marianne held out her hand. Lily glanced at her mother, then came forward. Marianne was shocked at how thin her own hand was after weeks of illness, at how much effort it took to lift. The wrinkled pale fingers enfolded Lily’s smoother ones. The child’s skin was lighter than her mother’s, darker than Noah’s would have been without the artificial coloring. She had a small, heart-shaped face and a firm, generous mouth. “I greet you, Lily,” she said in World. Marianne’s eyes filled with tears.
“Mom,” Noah said, “Llaa^moh¡ needs to get back to work, and you need to rest.”
At the mention of work, tears vanished. Work had always been the great organizer of Marianne’s life, the point of it. If her children had suffered from that, it was too late to make it right now, but not too late to go on contributing.
Llaa^moh¡ led Lily out. Marianne said, “The vaccines?”
“You need to talk to Salah or Claire about that. They’re both recovered. What I know is that they’re using the supply from Terra to… breed more? Make more somehow, but they haven’t got it yet. There’s a lab set up in the school. That kid you brought, Branch, is great with hardware—he got your laptop to function on our current. Now Isabelle is translating data from your laptop for our people, but we weren’t as far along as you, and—”
“Why did you lie about that, Noah? I mean, why did Smith? And where is he, anyway?” “Smith” had been the leader of the first expedition to Terra.
“Mee^hao¡ is dead. Cancer. Would Earth have been as much in awe of Worlders if you’d known that all our tech was secondhand and that we understood it even less than you? Would Terra have been as willing to cooperate, or to voyage here now?”
Marianne didn’t answer. She’d read history. The less advanced civilization was always either ignored or plowed under by the more advanced. Only the promise of advanced trade products had gotten the Friendship built; aggression and revenge had built the Stremlenie.
“Noah, help me up. I have to get to work.”
“Out of the question, Mom. You’re weak as a feather.”
“You don’t understand. I have to help. There’s no way that Jones—your wife—uh—”
Noah smiled. “You never were any good with languages. Call her Lallie. Kayla Rhinehart does.”
Marianne’s flash of resentment at being compared to Kayla, even the brief glimpse she had of Kayla, dissipated in the need to be working. “Lallie and Isabelle won’t know how I’ve organized the laptop files. Salah is a medical doctor, not a researcher, and Lallie doesn’t even speak English, does she?”
“Not much. Claire Patel is in charge, and Isabelle is translating.”
“No English at home, then? You really wanted to belong here, didn’t you, Noah?”
“I never belonged anywhere else,” he said, which was true, and not even his smile could soften the pain that his simple sentence caused Marianne.
Noah put his hand on hers. “I’m happy, Mom. Stop worrying about me. Tell you what, I’ll see if Claire wants to bring your laptop in here so you can explain whatever needs to be explained. But you stay here and do whatever Salah tells you. Okay?”
Marianne nodded. “Noah, are you in charge here?”
“I am not. World is matrilineal, you know. The first expedition had Mee^hao¡ as a leader only because Terra is so patriarchal. Isabelle is the mother of my lahk. Of this… this scientific lab that suddenly got built here, one of the mothers on the Great Council is in charge. She’s Lallie’s great-grandmother, very old and not too well. She arrived yesterday and is at her daughter’s lahk.”
“Is she a scientist? Or was she?”
“No.”
“There’s a very old, non-scientist, great-grandmother in charge of the only effort on Kindred to produce a vaccine? That doesn’t make sense!”
“In the United States you have—or had when I left—a president with no military service in charge of a huge army with nuclear weapons.”
Marianne gazed at her son. When had he developed the ability, so lacking when he’d been on Terra, to riposte so effectively?
When he became happy, her mind said. Happy enough to replace despair with thought.
“All right, Noah. Bring the laptop and Lallie and Isabelle here, with Claire if she can be spared. And…”
“Yes?”
“The vaccine not being used for synthesis—you’ve vaccinated some people already, haven’t you? Are Lily and Lallie among them?”
Noah looked away. All at once she glimpsed, perhaps for the last time, the child he had been: unwilling to tell her where he’d been and what he’d been doing, unwilling to risk her displeasure. Then the child vanished and he said, “Not yet. There isn’t enough for everyone.”
“And on Kindred everybody is treated equally. Bullshit. You’re a capitalist society, aren’t you?”
“More socialist. But with really constrained capitalism, yes. But it’s not my decision. The Council of Mothers—”
“More bullshit. The spore cloud is what? Two months away? Vaccinate your family. Now, while you can.”
Noah said nothing. But she could tell he would not do it.
Marianne said, “One more thing. When can I see Lily again? Soon?
“Please?”
Austin squeezed through the tunnel, which seemed to have grown smaller since his last visit. He had wanted to come here sooner, but that hadn’t worked out. No one was expecting him, but when Tony heard Austin’s great idea, he—and Beyon-kal, too—would be really glad he’d come. Twenty yards in, when the tunnel turned sharply back on itself and the walls grew smoother, the faint light appeared. At the metal grill, Austin rang the bell. The door farther down the tunnel clanged open and Tony’s face appeared, scowling.