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.”
CHAPTER 22
Three months later, the camp was full again.
This time, they were not protesters or attackers or desperate people seeking vaccinations. This time, they were pilgrims. At least, that was the best word Marianne could find for them, since not even Isabelle seemed able to explain exactly why they came.
“They want to touch the ground where it happened,” was the best Isabelle could do. “It’s not a religious thing, exactly—but isn’t not a religious thing, either. This is where the ship brought the virophage and the ship came from their ancestors—you’ve noticed that most of the pilgrims are young—with the bodies of the colonists on it, and also this is where the virophage came from that saved Kindred. Both those that lost lahk members to R. sporii and those that didn’t come to touch the ship. We touch, you know—the ground, the trees, the rivers. Real, feeling interaction with the ecology is so important.”
But the ship wasn’t part of the ecology. Kindred hadn’t designed it or even built the star drive that made it possible, which was the work of the unknown “master aliens.” And it was the Terran scientists who had saved the planet. Marianne did not point all these things out. If this was Lourdes or Mecca or Stonehenge, then let the pilgrims come. They did no harm, although the “security risk” of their constantly changing presence drove Ranger Kandiss crazy.
Kandiss, not Brodie. Over the three months of people coming and going, of creating and applying materials to repair the ship’s hull, of fluctuating food supplies as harvests suffered from the diminished number of farmers and the loss of the three major cities, Leo Brodie had surprised Marianne with his acceptance of everything, with his calm, with his—there was no other word for it—ability to command.
And now the ship was ready. It had been repaired, cleaned of forty years’ of untended and, in some cases, unintended life-forms. It was stocked with supplies. The last groups of pilgrims were arriving. The ship had finally, according to Terran custom rather than Kindred, been named: the Return. And now decisions had to be made about who was going to Earth and who was staying here.
Marianne played with Lily every chance she could. She talked with Noah, got to know Llaa^moh¡. Her long-lost son, wonderful daughter-in-law, precious grandchild. Every time Marianne thought of leaving them, her heart flamed with pain.
But she had two other children and two other grandchildren, and this was not her world. She had never really thought it was. Marianne was going home.
“Is he ever coming out?” Austin asked Graa^lok. He meant Tony, of course. The boys talked endlessly about Tony, about Haven, about all that had happened. That’s how they referred to it: “the all.” Probably nothing so exciting would ever happen on World again.
Well, that might be okay.
“He’ll come out,” Graa^lok said. “Someday. Probably he’s waiting until the Rangers are gone so they won’t punish him for… the all. Austin—”
“I’m not going to Terra!” Austin said fiercely, as he had said a hundred times before. “They can’t make me! I’ll run away! I’ll go back to Haven! I’ll make Leo throw bombs down the airshaft to get me out, like Lieutenant Lamont did!”
“Leo-mak wouldn’t do it,” Graa^lok said. He had lost weight, eaten by guilt over his part in “the all.”
This was true. Leo wouldn’t do it. But Graa^lok was missing the point. “I’m not going,” Austin repeated.
“Your mother wants to go.”
This, unfortunately, was also true. The chance to return to Terra had made Kayla happier than anything else had in years. Maybe ever. “I know she’s going,” Austin said miserably. “But I can’t go, Graa^lok. I just can’t. I live here. I wouldn’t have any friends there, or a lahk except for Mom, or anything.”
The boys fell silent, unable to picture life without a lahk.
“They can’t make me go,” Austin said.
Graa^lok said nothing, staring down at his sandals to hide his expression.
The night before launch, the camp was again deserted. Apparently the Kindred felt the need to let the Terrans be alone with the ship. Leo didn’t understand that and didn’t try, but he was glad about it. He wanted to be alone.
He walked out from the compound across the field to the north, passing two groups of skaleth¡. One lay asleep in a clump, as they always did, looking like a football pile-on trying to recover the ball. The other group stood cropping grass, also in unison. On Kindred, “herd animals” applied to more than humans.
“I greet you, skaleth¡,” Leo said, in Kindese. The animals ignored him.
The ship loomed dark against a field of stars. Leo put his hand on the hull, which felt cool and smooth. Inside were supplies, pallets, room enough for a whole colony of people instead of the few that were going.
Five Kindred, two of them scientists, including boss scientist Ka^graa. Only five. Leo knew now what it cost Kindred to leave their lahks, but these had chosen to go. Some people, Terran or Kindred, were always what Dr. Jenner called “outliers”: different enough from their own culture to go off seeking another one. Ka^graa, whose wife was dead, was taking with him his oldest daughter. The mother of her lahk had agreed.
Kandiss was going. He had wanted to leave Kindred since the minute he first set foot on it. The Seventy-Fifth Regiment was his life, and he was going back to it.
Dr. Jenner and Branch Carter were going. So was Dr. Patel, who’d said she’d be needed to oversee the microbe adjustment necessary for the Kindred to live on Terra and the Terrans to get their original microbes back. Leo, remembering what that involved, winced. But it was necessary if you wanted to go home.