“He kidnapped Claire!”
“We’ll get her back. We’ll get all of them back. Tony Schrupp is a dirtbag but not a killer, not really. He only tried to take out Lamont in some sort of self-defense.”
“Lamont—”
Leo held up a hand. “Don’t, Isabelle.” He wasn’t ready yet to talk with her about Owen. Maybe he never would be.
“All right. What do you need me to do now?”
Several answers rose to mind, but this wasn’t the time. Also, Leo doubted he’d be able to follow through, not for a while yet, although Bourgiba said his liver seemed to be healing well. Why was a liver so fucking important?
He said, “Check on the squad for me, ask if Lu^kaj^ho and his guys need anything, and what they’re hearing. Make sure Kandiss isn’t shooting anybody. Go up on the roof, I told him to let you, and eyeball the camp for me. Tell me everything you can, but do not go into the camp. I mean it, Isabelle. Don’t set foot out of the compound.”
“All right.”
She didn’t argue, and Isabelle not arguing was a welcome thing. Still, it was probably temporary.
“Leo,” she said, “what if Marianne and Branch can’t get the ship back here?”
“You know what. We go to the original plan, plan A.”
“Everybody either gets sick or dies.”
“And then we go on from there. Rebuilding with whoever gets well.”
She bent over and kissed him on the lips. Leo’s eyes flew open. The kiss was sweet, sudden, and brief. His chest swelled like he’d been shot all over again. She said quietly, “I love your optimism, even in the face of everything you must have seen and done.”
Then she was gone, opening his door to the sound of babies howling, then closing it again without looking back.
Marianne stirred a big pot of vegetable stew in the clinic kitchen. At least, she hoped it was going to turn out to be vegetable stew, given that she was unfamiliar with all the ingredients and had never been much of a cook anyway. She should have left this to someone else, but Isabelle was busy with Leo Brodie, Salah with doctoring, Noah with recovering and tending his wife and daughter, and the Kindred mothers with their kids—no, that wasn’t true. Marianne was making stew because she could no longer sit beside Branch, “helping” to search for a way to turn a series of random numbers into a meaningful sequence. Branch was tireless at what Marianne was coming to see as a hopeless task, but Branch was young. Marianne was not.
One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.
The stew turned out edible, more or less. (How much longer would they have electricity for cooking veggies? How much longer would they have veggies?) She helped serve it to everyone jammed into the compound. Full of people, empty, full again—both compound and stew bowls. There was something profound in there, or at least notable, but Marianne was too tired to find it. Her back ached. Her head ached with thinking, except when it ached from trying not to think the same thoughts over and over.
One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause…
“Mom,” Noah said, “go to bed. You look exhausted.”
“You do, too.”
“I’m recovering from a concussion. What’s your excuse?”
“I would laugh but I’m too tired,” Marianne said. “Did Isabelle take stew out to the soldiers?”
“I did. I need to do something.”
Marianne looked at her tall, alien son, with his artificially copper skin and surgically altered eyes and the same sweet smile he’d had as a little boy. There was nothing she could do to help him save the life he loved except what Branch was already doing, Claire had already done, and Leo Brodie was trying to do from his sickbed. The only thing Marianne could do for Noah was spare him more anxiety.
“I’m going,” she said. “Tell Lily good night for me.”
“I will,” Noah said, although they both knew that Lily had been asleep for hours. But when the world was ending, Marianne had discovered, tiny normal things mattered. A lot.
To her surprise, she fell asleep almost immediately. It was a deep, restful sleep, without dreams, until, abruptly, she woke.
Silence. Darkness. Both total and complete, as if she lay in a cave, or in the womb. But an image danced before her, clear as one of the countless drawings she’d made in college biology class, nearly fifty years ago.
Marianne pressed a button on her Terran watch, which was useless for telling the time here but good for illumination. In the tiny light of its dial, she made her way from her room to the leelee lab. Branch lay heavily asleep on a pallet beside the call-back device.
One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.
Marianne switched on a light; Branch did not stir. Gingerly she lowered herself to the floor and pulled the call-back device to her.
A four-sided pyramid, with four bumps marching down each side. Did it matter which of the bumps near the apex she called “one”? Maybe not, for what she had in mind. The universe runs on mathematics, Branch had cried, with all the passion of the young scientist. He was right, of course. The physical universe ran on mathematics. But the human universe ran on something else, something that had to be known to any race who could follow master plans to build a starship.
One tone, pause, six tones, pause, eleven tones, pause, sixteen tones, pause, nine tones, pause, fourteen tones, pause, three tones, pause, eight tones, very long pause, one tone. Silence.
She pressed hard on one of the bumps near the apex. Her finger counted off the other three bumps on that face: two, three, four. Then the bump at the top of the adjoining face would be five and the one under it six. She pressed it hard.
Probably nothing would happen. Talk about your long shots….
The third button down on the next triangular face would be eleven, and the bottom button on the fourth face would be sixteen. She had spiraled down the pyramid, pressing. Her fingers returned to its pointed top, pressing the button on the face opposite where she had begun. That was bump nine. Then fourteen, three, eight, spiraling down the face of the pyramid, tracing a distinct pattern.
A double helix.
But what about that last single tone, following a much longer pause, that completed the code from the colony ship? What was that?
A ship’s number. It was the first one built, the first one launched, forty Kindred years ago. But where…
The whole thing was probably futile anyway, so did it really matter? Marianne returned her finger to the first bump she’d pressed and pressed it again, as hard as she could.
Blattt!
Marianne cried out, the noise was so loud. She slammed her hands over her ears. Branch woke and groped for a knife from under his pallet. The door flew open and Noah, in the room across the hall, rushed in.
Blattt!!!!
Then Leo Brodie stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb but upright, a rifle in his hands. He yelled something but no one could hear him, or anything else, until the device stopped blatting and a silence, shocking after all that noise, fell. More people crowded into the corridor, kept back by Leo’s slumping body.
Branch said in an incongruous whisper, “What did you do?”
Marianne said, “I think I just called back the ship with the virophage.”
CHAPTER 20
In the two days since Marianne had called back the ship—if that was indeed what she had done—Salah had watched the refugee camp fill up again. People came by bicycle, by truck, by animal cart, on foot. They left their lahks just days before the spore cloud hit. Nearly all of them were furious.