If Tomorrow Comes by Nancy Kress

Author:Nancy Kress
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER 12

Kindred had plant-based drugs, including powerful opioids. The opioids had surprised Salah. Ree^ka refused all drugs, which did not surprise him.

She lay in Marianne’s room, now hers (Marianne must have squeezed a pallet in someplace else; Salah had no idea where). Although she had refused medical examination, Salah judged that Ree^ka would not survive another night. He hoped that after this critical meeting, she would take the opioid. He understood that she wanted her mind clear now, but he knew of no aspect of the Kindred worldview that would preclude palliative care after the Mother of Mothers had handed down her last decrees. Surely some version of hospice must be included in bu^ka^tel. The Kindred considered themselves stewards of each other as well as of their precious, limited continent.

Ree^ka turned her head on her pillow, and did not succeed in suppressing a faint groan.

Wherever there were narcotics, there was an illegal market for them. That, too, was an aspect of life here that Salah needed to assimilate. If he was going to be here for the rest of his life—and since making love to Isabelle, that didn’t seem such a terrible prospect—he needed more than the language. He needed the culture it served, because no one knew how many Kindred survivors might have natural immunity to R. sporii, as some Stone Age humans on Earth had. There was so much he didn’t know.

Claire said, “Where’s Branch? He left Big Lab to come here ten minutes ago.”

Marianne said, “Probably in the leelee lab, working with the recordings from the ship. I’ll get him. Don’t start without us.”

No one would. Marianne and Claire were in charge of what Salah now thought of as the failed vaccine program, although that wasn’t really fair. In medicine, a partial success was not a failure, not even when the partial was very partial indeed.

The one leelee that had been sickened but not killed by R. sporii had begun to eat. Slowly, slowly the animal was recovering. There was no way to examine it closely, as there would have been in a biosafety level 4 lab; to break the seal on the improvised negative-pressure cage would have been to release spores into the lab. Kindred and Terran scientists had been reduced to watching it through the glass, to crouching on the floor to squint up at its turds from below, to rapping on the side of the cage to determine response, and other totally inadequate measures. But it was indubitable that the leelee now dragged itself around, ate and drank, sent forth a few faint chitters around its dead and decaying cousins, which also could not be removed from the cage.

Marianne and Branch returned, Branch looking as if he hadn’t either slept or washed in too long. Everyone was working overtime, but Branch was also working at the hopeless task of decoding alien signals transmitted in alien code from an alien transmitter to a jerry-rigged device he did not fully understand. When she could be spared, Isabelle studied his notes to see if they corresponded to spoken Kindred.

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