The War on Treemon by Nancy Kress

The author's latest science fiction novel, Crossfire, will be out from Tor next month. It's about a human planetary colony caught in the crossfire of a war between two much more technologically advanced alien species. In her newest story for us, she takes a look at some disparate human cultures and how they cope with ... The War on Treemon.

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I. CLAREE

The third aka: Good is not corruption, Claree chanted, and it made no sense to her. Of course good wasn't corruption; if it were corruption, it wouldn't be good. She tried singing the aka, then speaking it conversationally, then muttering it darkly into the mirrored surface of her closed handheld. Nothing helped. Whatever depths the aka was supposed to reveal, she couldn't see into them. And in half an hour she would face the Novitiate Master.

Claree kicked a loose rock, then guiltily glanced around the dome. No one else had come in, thank the universe. The Quiet Dome, plunked down at the end of a long tunnel from the Novitiate like a shell in the tentacle of a one-armed octopus, was empty. It held only Claree, one of the Novitiate cats, and several hundred yellowish Parthia rocks that were supposed to make the Quiet Dome seem like outdoors. The clear pizoelectric walls seemed to disappear. In front of Claree was only the silent emptiness of Parthia stretching away to the horizon.

Sighing, Claree cleared a small space of rocks and sat cross-legged. Good is not corruption. She filled her mind with specific images: rocks and cats and the people in the Novitiate, their faces and hands and rock carvings and computers and shampoo bottles. The real is concrete, said the second aka, and Claree had mastered that one. She could block out the abstract, the theoretical, the non-existent generalizations and let her mind brim with the glorious touchable world. But that didn't help, either. No patterns formed from tangibles to turn Corruption is not good into anything other than a dumb tautology.

The Novitiate cat crawled onto her lap. A gray tabby with green eyes, he was called Phantom by everybody else but Cat by Claree, striving for concreteness. He curled onto her legs and went to sleep in the weak sunshine.

“At this rate, Cat, I'll never become a Servant of Peace,” Claree said. The cat didn't care.

She sat still as long as she dared, not wanting to disturb the animal, whose soothing purr was supposed to help postulants concentrate. It didn't, at least not Claree, but the cat felt good on her skinny thighs, warm and heavy. He felt so good that she waited too long before dumping him off and running along the tunnel to the Novitiate, smoothing her short dark hair with one hand as she ran. Nobody was late to see the Master. Especially not someone in such a precarious position as Claree.

* * *

“Postulant, we have a difficulty with you,” the Master said.

Claree dropped her eyes and didn't answer.

“You have been here two years last week, have you not?”

She nodded.

“And the third aka ... nothing.”

Dumbly, Claree shook her head. They were going to ask her to leave. Pressure built behind her eyelids, and she bit her lip hard to keep the swooping vertigo at bay.

“That's better,” the Master said quietly. “How badly do you want to become a Servant of Peace?”

Claree raised her eyes in astonishment. How could he even ask that? She gazed at him, spare and competent in his black uniform with its tight gold neckband and blue service chips. The Master had advised on Celestia, New Earth, Juniper—he had been used in the Landing Day revolution at Dacha City! With the Orion Arm colonies having reached critical colonization mass, established colonies founding new colonies of their own, there was no better time to enter the service. Didn't he know how Claree felt?

She choked out, “I think it's the most important job ever. To guide politicians toward peace, to become a professional whose job is to manage violence and whose client is the entire galaxy ... without stable governments you cannot conserve any of the institutions that bring prosperity and—”

“I didn't ask you to recite the Ten Points, postulant,” the Master said dryly. “I asked how badly you want to become a Servant of Peace.”

“With all my heart. I'll do anything to qualify!”

“Hmmmm.” He studied her, his face grave.

“Please don't ... please don't send me away, Master. I truly want to see the world according to the akas. I just ... just....”

He handed her a tissue. “You just can't see why good is not corruption.”

Shamed, she whispered, “No.”

“Can you see Yuki? Visualize her concretely, in the Quiet Dome, beside Hans. What are they doing?”

What was the Master doing? He was leading her toward a pattern. Not his role, and not in the rules. She was supposed to see the pattern, the meaning in each aka, for herself. Frantically she seized on the images of Yuki, of Hans, doing ... what? Claree had never observed them doing anything together, and certainly not in the Quiet Dome.

The Master said gently, “Mwakwambe is there, too.”

Mwakwambe ... Mwakwambe.... Did Mwakwambe even know Yuki? Side by side by side their images were ... nothing.

“Master, I haven't observed concretely enough.” It was a shameful confession: Observation is all, said the first aka.

The Master shifted in his chair, and Claree waited miserably for her dismissal. Where would she go, what would she do? This was all she had wanted her entire life.

“Claree,” he said, “I'm going to invoke an unusual measure. You've exceeded the allowed time to master the first three akas, but, in rare situations, a postulant may be granted more time, if that time is served away from the Novitiate and under a Servant who is in an active order. This afternoon you will be on the train to Cramos.”

“To ... to the city?”

“And from there to the spaceport, with passage to Treemon.”

“You're sending me ... off-world?”

“To Treemon. Someone will meet you there and you will be taken to a Servant named Benn Ko. You may or may not encounter other Servants and their operations before you reach him. Learn from everything you see.”

“But—”

“Pack lightly,” the Master said, gazing at her, considering her, while Claree tried to understand what was happening. It was no clearer than the third aka. She stumbled from the room, just as the gray cat slinked into it, confident and sleek.

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II. BRAK

In the second year of the war, Brak left his village on Green River to go alone into the mountains. He'd begun to have doubts about the war, its rightness and conduct, and everyone he broached these concerns to reacted with either shock or anger. Didn't he realize what these people were, what kind of world they wanted? Didn't he care that Treemon had been attacked?

Brak had no answers. He couldn't even articulate his own doubts clearly. So he decided to do a wamu in the mountains to clear his head and detoxify his soul and examine the nature of his doubts as best he could. He was fifteen; it would be his first solo wamu.

He traveled east, away from the beautiful populated valley, and away from the war far to the west. Brak was no athlete, and the climb upward was difficult in places for a spindly young man with a too-heavy shoulder pack. His mother had overloaded him with food and survival supplies. She'd also made him promise to do the casu wamu, the meditation without fasting, and to be home by dark of the fifth day. She hugged him good-bye without meeting his eyes.

Late afternoon of the third day he reached a small grassy plateau in the foothills, where he made camp. Brak liked that from the plateau he couldn't see civilization at all. While climbing the last three days, he'd had all of Greater Treemon laid out below him: the fertile valleys with their green fields and compost tanks, the eco forests restricted to no more visitors than the land could handle, the solar-powered plants where soy and high-protein vegetable bolin were made into tasty, nutritious food. It had all been beautiful, but Brak was obscurely glad to leave it behind for this hidden upland meadow bordered by exactly the kind of rock formations that promised caves.

Not that he had time to explore caves, he thought with a little spurt of resentment. He'd have to leave tomorrow morning in order to keep his promise to his mother. Of course, he could call her and say he was staying away longer, but promises must be kept; they were the foundation of a trustful society. Anyway, using the comlink would break his wamu.

Brak made a fire, ate dinner, and activated the electronic perimeter. The eastern mountains were famous for cave hyluts, and of course Brak would never carry a weapon. His family was opposed to guns for anyone but the army, about which Brak knew almost nothing.

He tried to think about the army as the quick tropical darkness fell. Why did men and women join an army? How could you know your side was right? Was fighting always wrong unless you were attacked? Did thinking about these things mean that he, Brak, had a great soul, or did even wondering that about yourself mean your soul was petty and small?

He heard a noise in the darkness.

Nothing could get in across the perimeter, he reminded himself. Nonetheless, he moved a little closer to the fire, peering into the gloom.

The noise came closer.

“Hello?” Brak called uncertainly, because now the sound was definitely moving inside the perimeter. It took on a dark shape. Frantically he clawed through his backpack for the comlink. Before he could find it, the dark shape became a person, then the next second a girl, and then the neurostunner fired at him and he toppled sideways and out.

* * *

When Brak woke, he lay inside a cave, listening to a baby cry.

A baby?

Incredible, but there in a basket beside the blanket on which Brak lay was a baby. A warmly wrapped, howling infant. Beyond the basket lay a little boy, asleep on a nest of blankets. As Brak sat up, a girl walked over to the baby and picked it up, patting and jiggling it with no effect whatsoever. It was the girl who had fired at him at his campsite. She wore heavy boots and a black uniform of some sort. Not Treemon Free Army, not enemy green.

“Oh, you're awake,” she said, smiling. “Good, because it's almost time to go. Do you have a headache?”

Brak shook his head, unable to speak. The baby screamed louder.

“I'll be right back,” the girl said. She was very pretty, with floating fair hair above the tight gold neckband of a black uniform. “Just let me give this kid to someone who actually knows about babies.” She walked away.

Brak jerked himself to his feet and started to follow her. He was stopped by an invisible barrier through which she passed effortlessly. The girl disappeared behind a turning in the rock, and the baby's cries grew fainter. Brak looked around helplessly. He now saw that in addition to the sleeping boy, two more children lay on blankets in this corner of the cave.

The girl returned. “All right, we're getting ready to go. Are you going to give us any trouble? We didn't plan on you, you know. You're really too old.”

“For what?” Brak blurted. Fear arrived all at once, like a sudden downpour.

“I'm not the proper person to explain that to you,” the girl said primly. “Incidentally, what's your name?”

Should he answer? Brak hesitated, finally gave his personal name but not his family name. “Brak.”

“I'm Julu, private second class, Servants of Peace.” She smiled warmly. She was only a few years older than he was. Two men rounded the cave turning and headed toward the two little girls on the far blanket. Gently they picked up the children.

Julu hoisted the sleeping boy in her arms. “Come on, Brak,” she said. “Yani doesn't like to be kept waiting.”

Yani? Waiting for what? Brak thought of refusing to follow her—but then what? What would that gain him? It might even look like cowardice, and he didn't want this older, sophisticated girl to think he was a coward. Maybe it would be best to do what he was told until he understood what was going on.

He followed Julu out of the cave.

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III. CLAREE

Treemon City spaceport almost broke her nerve, until Claree scolded herself for cowardice. How could she benefit from this great service opportunity if she couldn't face a few native guards with irrelevant machinery?

The guards didn't consider the machinery irrelevant, of course. Claree had studied in the ship's library how wary Treemon was of outsiders, especially now that they were at war.

“Step this way, ma'am,” the guard said. “Now, what you have to do is step into this decon booth, take off all your clothes, and push them through the slot in the opposite wall. Just press the button when you're ready. When the shower's over, the room will dry and biodegradable clothing will slide out for you. Your own clothes will be available when you come out, and the rest of your luggage will wait for you in the visitors’ hall.”

“I don't—”

“It's completely private, ma'am,” the female guard said warmly. “No surveillance equipment in decon booths. You have our word, ma'am. Your modesty is protected.”

Claree hadn't been worried about her modesty. Treemon, she'd read, was as sexually puritanical as it was fanatic about green technology. The two often went together: sanctity and inviolability of the planet, sanctity and inviolability of the body. Claree had gone through decon on the ship, but apparently that was not enough for Treemon. She smiled at the two guards and stepped into the booth.

The next step was tissue samples, for DNA scan. A medtech asked her formally, as he drew blood and took cell scrapings, “You are not the product of genetic engineering, are you, ma'am?”

Claree possessed genemods, altered in vitro, to replace genes that might have eventually resulted in three inherited-tendency diseases. The gene replacements were undetectable, merely substitutions of healthy alleles for deformed ones. The Master had instructed her on what to say. “No, I have no genetic modifications.”

“And you have no biological implants? Non-living implants like eye lenses or heart valves are fine. Even mechanical muscle augments are tolerated, just nothing living. We on Treemon respect biological integrity.”

“I have no living symbiotes.” This they could check by Klein scan, and probably would.

“Thank you, ma'am.”

Her small canvas bag had been irradiated. Her Klein scan, a tiresome procedure that took several hours, was negative. Freedom, she was cheerfully reminded by the official who entered her in the Treemon deebee, depended on secure, biologically protected borders. Although of course Treemon City was always happy to welcome journalists like herself; the more of the Orion Arm that knew of the workable utopia that had been created here, the better. Information must be free in a fully human society. Welcome to Treemon!

“Thank you,” Claree said.

She was disposed to be critical. No place that thought so well of itself could be that good. But, riding through the city in a solar bus, heading for the outlying valleys, Claree had to admit that Treemon looked pretty good. She took three buses more than necessary, wanting to see as much as possible. Housing in places was modest, but she saw no squalor, no real poverty. Trees grew everywhere. Factories were ecologically sound. Children looked safe. And, even though Treemon was at war with its neighbor to the east, Ignatus, there were no soldiers on the streets.

Treemon kept the war on the enemy's ground.

As her fourth bus left the city, Claree was especially interested in the farms. Her journalist credentials gave her license to ask questions. She got off at a depot village, sauntered into the café (at least she hoped it was a saunter), and introduced herself as a journalist to two clean, intelligent-looking people with dirt on their boots.

“You don't raise meat animals, is that correct, sir?”

Obvious distaste crossed his features, but his reply was courteous. “That's correct, yes. Treemon is vegetarian. We respect the souls of animals as well as humans, since of course humans are animals. Each species must keep to its own kind.”

“Have you ever tasted animal flesh, then?”

The woman burst out, “The very idea is blasphemous!”

Interesting.

“Not that we blame you for asking,” the farm woman went on more calmly, “you're an outsider. I didn't mean to yell at you. It takes time for everyone to reach the same level. We in Treemon respect biological integrity above all.” She smiled at Claree.

Claree probed, although she already knew the answer. “But the enemy you're at war with ... the Ignati ... they eat animal flesh?”

“They abuse every aspect of the planet,” the man said. “Fields, water, air, life. All they know is exploitation and subjugation. They have no concept of biological integrity.”

“So I read.”

“I promise you this,” the woman said with a sudden return of vehemence, “once we've won this war, their whole society will be transformed. Once they know what freedom and respect are, they'll naturally want them for themselves.”

“I see,” Claree said. “Thank you.”

“Anything we can do for you, ma'am?”

“No, thank you,” Claree said, and got back on the bus. They had not asked her one thing about the place she had come from.

The upland valleys were even more beautiful than the city. As the bus climbed, the temperature fell. Claree put on her warm, irradiated jacket. It still felt strange to be out of postulant uniform, to feel the cool air at the open neck of her soft shirt. She zipped up the jacket.

The bus stopped at the lower-mountain village of Demar just before dark. It was a raucous, jolly place, full of inns and bars for the miners that came and went into this part of the mountains. The rough humor of such places didn't offend Claree. She stayed the night, and in the morning followed her directions to the meeting place. An hour of gentle hiking, and there it was, the skimmer, in a small clearing. A young man dawdled in front of it.

“I'm Claree Postulant,” she said formally.

“Private first class Kel Servant.”

Claree hesitated. “You're not in uniform. And I was supposed to meet someone named Benn Ko.”

“We don't wear uniforms when we're among the natives,” Kel said, looking surprised. “Didn't they tell you that? This is a non-requested operation.”

No one had told Claree much of anything, except the name of her contact. She didn't want this supercilious man to know that. She said only, “I was told to meet Benn Ko.”

“I'm supposed to take you to Yani. Maybe he'll get you to this Benn Ko. The quee message only came in from your Novitiate last night—you do know about quee?”

Claree merely looked disdainful. Quantum-Entangled Energy links for instantaneous interstellar communication was first-year stuff. She wasn't sure she liked Kel.

He repeated, “The message only came in last night. We were on black-out. Treemon isn't militarily sophisticated, and they prefer to keep to themselves, but they're not Industrial Age, either. They track everything they can, and they've got a few good satellites upstairs. Anyway, Yani couldn't come, the operation developed a complication. He sent me to get you. But I have another job to do, too, so I'm just going to drop you off where Yani can pick you up.”

He sounded harried, and the arrangements seemed unnecessarily complicated. But it wasn't her place to judge. They would tell her what the operation was when she needed to know. Claree climbed into the skimmer, taking careful mental notes: Observation is all.

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IV. BRAK

The skimmer flew low, behind mountains and barely above rivers, and after a while Brak realized that the pilot was doing everything possible to avoid detection. Who were these people? He didn't dare ask, and even if he had dared, it would have been difficult. Besides the pilot, there were Julu, the two men, and the four small children, three of whom were now awake and screaming. The noise was deafening. The three adults tried to calm the children, completely without success.

Finally one of the men shouted to the other, “Sedative?”

“Yani says no.”

“Christ.”

The skimmer flew on.

When it landed with a thump, they were far from Treemon, somewhere in the Eastern Scrub. Deep, dry canyons wrinkled the land. The pilot flew nearly into the mouth of one, making Brak clutch the sides of his seat. The sleeping boy woke up, looked at the strangers around him, and began to yell louder than the other three children, who now redoubled their flagging din.

Julu opened the door of the skimmer and lifted the child out. He kicked her hard in the belly—Brak heard the sound of hard small boots on soft flesh—and she doubled over, setting him down. He ran off, tripped over a rock, and sprawled on the hard ground. Blood gushed from his face.

The adults rushed over to him. Julu lay gasping. No one paid the slightest attention to Brak. He slipped around the skimmer, so its bulk blocked him from sight, and began to run.

The ground was uneven here, so full of rifts and boulders and abrupt sheer, if small, cliffs, that he felt confident he couldn't be followed easily. He would get as far as he could and then hide. They wouldn't find him, they had their hands full with the small kids, there were a million places to hide. Brak could hold out until they left ... and then what?

He couldn't think that far ahead. Gasping great lungfuls of air, he pushed himself to keep moving, keep climbing, keep sliding down the small treacherous precipices, don't make too much noise if he could help it—

He skid nearly on top of the cave hylut, sunning itself on the rocks.

The beast woke and bared its teeth, two terrible rows of sharp angry knives. Brak drew a sharp breath and started to back away. No, you were supposed to hold your ground with a cave hylut ... no, you were supposed to—

The hylut sprang at him.

Brak screamed. In mid-air the beast heard the scream, shivered, and fell senseless to the ground. Brak stared. Then he saw the girl holding the gun, and the hole burned in the hylut's hide, still smoking a little. The stench of burning flesh and foul hylut odor wafted toward him on the breeze.

“I got him,” the girl said in wonder. She smiled broadly. “Are you all right?”

“Yes ... thank you.”

“You're with Yani, right? Or Benn Ko? Here to pick me up?”

Brak said nothing, trying to fit the pieces together. They didn't mesh. She was younger than Julu, he saw now, not as pretty, skinny, and with short dark hair in frizzy waves.

“I'm Claree. I've only been here a half hour or so, since they left me for pick-up. Is the skimmer over there someplace? Are you a postulant?”

Something was clearly expected of him. Brak shook his head.

Her eyes widened. “A Servant already? How old are you?”

Again he just shook his head.

She looked abashed. “I'm sorry, I didn't realize I shouldn't ask that. I'm new, you know, just a postulant assigned to Benn Ko. I'm ... I'm still working on my akas.” Sudden doubt creased her features. “Why weren't you armed? Out here, I mean. Even I ... oh, gods. You're not a Servant at all, are you? A local?”

“Yes,” he answered, because if she didn't realize that there couldn't be locals where there was nothing local to farm or mine or gather, then it wasn't his business to enlighten her. Could she be ... oh, shit ... an agent of the Ignati? Their women held the power positions, after all, they had no sexual equality at all. But ... what would an agent of the Ignati be doing in the Eastern Scrubs?

“The situation is this,” Claree said with sudden determination that looked to Brak as if it were partly desperation. “I probably just said too much. If you could not tell anyone you saw me, or that I said ... oh, gods!”

He saw an advantage. “I won't say anything to anyone if you tell me what you're here for. I mean, I need to be sure my ... my village isn't in danger.” He was quite proud of this last invention.

Claree chewed her bottom lip. “All right, but only a little. And only because everything I read said that your people, Treemon people, honor their promises.”

“It's the foundation of our society,” he said, truthfully.

“All right. I'm a Servant of Peace, or at least I will be when I finish the training. We're here to help bring the war between Treemon and Ignatus to peace. I don't know any details, but we're operating undercover.”

Brak felt dizzy. The Servants of Peace! They were half legend on Treemon, which had prided itself on its curtailed communication with the rest of the galaxy. "We live lives of harmony with the planet,” his teachers all said, “and let less enlightened peoples choose their own path, as long as they leave us alone in return.”

“You must know a lot,” he blurted.

Claree blushed. “Well, not me, of course, I hardly know anything, but the Servants ... you can trust us, Brak. Whatever this operation is about, it can only bring good to your people.”

“But they abducted me. And four other children.”

She frowned. “Abducted?”

“They kidnapped me!”

“I don't know anything about that. But if ... I'm sure it's only temporary and for a good reason. They'll return you to your ... family?”

“Mother and father and sister!” He was indignant now, and the reek of the cave hylut made it obscurely worse. “And you killed that creature.”

“It was going to kill you!”

“Well, yes. But it was just following its nature. Still, you were justified in the murder, I think.”

“You're a prig,” she said flatly.

“I am not! I just think about things!”

“In the abstract. Not the concrete thing itself. Only the concrete is real.”

“Oh, dung,” Brak said boldly, and then was smothered in confusion. This girl was with the Servants of Peace. How dared he—

“You don't understand,” she said loftily. “But whatever the Servants need you for, you won't be harmed, and it will be for the good of your people in the long run. Good is not corruption.” Suddenly her eyes widened and she let out a cry of delight.

“What—”

“Oh, I could kiss you!” Claree jumped at him and, before he could recoil, she did kiss him.

Brak felt himself go scarlet. A second later anger flooded him, an anger he didn't understand, and without even thinking about it, he took Claree's gun from her slack hand and pointed it at her.

“Brak—” she said, in honest bewilderment.

“I'm taking this. And I'm leaving here. I don't know why I was kidnapped, but it isn't right. I have the freedom to go where I want! It's a basic freedom we have and the Ignati don't ... to say the least! Now, I'm leaving you here—” But she would just run back to the people in the skimmer. Should he tie her up? With what? And what if another cave hylut came by and ate her? Brak could never, ever be responsible for a human death. Hopelessness flooded him. This was not the way a wamu was supposed to go.

Claree said, sudden formal, “Brak, you don't understand. The Servants of Peace are professionals. Our job is to manage violence, and our client is the entire galaxy. We observe carefully and then do what we can, without causing any violence ourselves. There isn't any reward in it for us, except for promoting stability.”

Brak considered. That all sounded good. He didn't seriously weigh the idea that she might be lying, because she so clearly believed what she was saying. Also, Brak had not often been lied to, and he tended to believe what he was told.

She went on, gaining momentum. “Stability is good, Brak! We keep societies from destroying themselves, or each other, so that all the good things that require stability can flourish. Learning, art, science, agriculture. You can't have those things if the fields and cities are all torn up and bombed.”

That, too, made sense. His parents stressed the beauty of calm, stable lives, lived in freedom and beauty.

“The Servants of Peace don't take stability for granted,” Claree said. “We have experience with all sorts of societies, and we know that human beings learn from experience, not abstracts.”

And that, too, was reasonable. The Treemon education system was built on hands-on experience. Certainly Brak had learned more about soil management from working with old Mr. Garander than from any text software.

“We're here to help, not harm.” Claree said solemnly, her dark eyes shining, and Brak lowered his gun.

“All right,” he said, feeling very mature. “I see your point.”

She grinned happily. “Good. Can I have my laser?”

He handed it to her, not without relief; his father violently disapproved of guns. In the distance he heard a clatter.

Claree said, “I think they're coming for me. Let's go meet them, Brak.”

He followed her, scrambling over loose rocks and uneven ground. He had chosen to follow her, to trust these people, yet he wished they hadn't shown up so quickly after he decided that. It might look to outsiders as if he hadn't actually made a choice.

They were heading in the direction of the breeze, and he turned his head to avoid the foul stench of the dead cave hylut.

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V. CLAREE

It was big, a much bigger operation than she'd expected. Big, and totally baffling.

She was glowing from her persuasion of Brak to return with her. “Good work, Claree,” Yani had said when she finally met him. He was a big man, very dark, with a thick beard and eyes of a peculiar color, somewhere between gold and gray. Genemod, she guessed, and wondered how he'd gotten through the Treemon City spaceport. Although, she realized a moment later, of course he hadn't come in that way.

“Are you going to take me to Benn Ko?” she asked. “My Master said you would.”

“Eventually. We have our hands full right here, as you can see.” He swept his hand in a wide arc, smiling.

The cave was huge, and very deep in a low hill that, from the air, had looked like a thousand other low, barren, irregular hills. The inside had been coated with foamcast and fitted with air-renewing genemod micros. Powercubes cast light. There was foamcast furniture—a minimum of furniture, true, but someone still had had to transport enough compressed canisters to spray the tables and chairs into shape. Foamcast divided the huge space into three rooms: the all-use one that Claree stood in now, a closed one in the back that she hadn't yet seen, and a nursery for the ten children.

Ten children ... all abducted from various parts of Treemon. Claree tried not to flinch from the word. Abducted, kidnapped. Yani had reassured her they would all be returned in perfect health to their families, and of course Claree knew they would. But...

“Why are the children here?” she blurted to Yani.

He smiled. “Did your Master ever make you observe things and find the patterns for yourself?”

“Of course.” It was the basic method of instruction—surely Yani knew that?

“Then do it now.”

The tone of authority was unmistakable. So was the rebuke. Claree felt herself flush with heat. He thought she was stupid. She was as much a failure here as at the Novitiate.

“You did do good work with that Treemon boy,” Yani said, smiling at her. “Now go on doing good work.” He stood and strolled away.

She was reprieved.

* * *

When the first team of two men came back a few hours later carrying an enormous plastic box between them, Claree stayed silent. She'd learned her lesson. Observation is all.

They carried the box into the back room. Claree sat quietly with the infant, whom she'd offered to watch. A woman who seemed to be a nurse had accepted gratefully. Awkwardly, Claree held the baby up on her shoulder as the nurse had showed her and walked around the main room in large circles, crooning a wordless tune. The baby seemed to like this, or maybe it had just been fed. Anyway, it went to sleep. Claree pulled a corner of its blanket over its face and pretended it was still awake, so she could go on pacing slowly, watching everything.

There were only seven kids left in the “nursery.” Brak had vanished.

All of the medical personnel, or what Claree had identified as “medical personnel,” were in the back room, which remained tightly shuttered. A girl called Julu, whom Claree had met and didn't like, loitered at the closed door. She was armed.

Yani was not in the cave.

The skimmer was gone, and its pilot.

Claree strolled, jiggling the baby, over to Julu. “Hello again.”

Julu smiled. “Is it asleep?”

“Not yet. Is this child next to go in there?”

Julu shrugged. “They don't tell me, of course. But I think they're working down in age.”

“Yes,” Claree agreed absently, crooning a different tune at the baby. “Do you like kids?”

“No, not really.”

“Me, neither,” Claree said, “although Brak told me he did.” She waited to see if Julu would catch the lie.

“They do, the Treemon. In fact, they worship their children. Lucky for us.”

Claree took a risk. “Well, not luck. Yani would have designed the operation differently if the Treemon were indifferent parents.”

“Yes, you're right,” Julu said. “I didn't realize Yani had told you about it.”

“We had quite a talk,” Claree said modestly. Julu was stupid. How had she even gotten through her Novitiate?

“Well, he can be very good to new Servants,” Julu said, and blushed, and Claree saw her clearly. She was a type, and very pretty.

“When will Brak come out?” Claree asked. Julu had said they were going down in age; Brak, who stumbled into the operation, was not really a child.

“Post-op in the nursery,” Julu said, “so the doctors can start on others as soon as they get the parts.”

“Yes,” Claree said, and pinched the baby so it woke up and cried, and she had an excuse to shrug at Julu and wander off, jiggling and crooning.

Parts. Parts of what? They were performing some medical procedure on Brak, on all the kids in turn, that would aid the peace effort. What would do that? It must be something temporary, reversible, non-painful. Recording devices? Trackers? Those didn't make sense. "They worship their children. Lucky for us.” Ransom? But the Servants didn't need money, and how would ransoming children bring peace?

Another thought came to her: Were all the children Treemon? Could some of them be Ignati? The people of the two countries didn't, she thought she remembered, look much different from each other ... or did they?

Still lulling the baby, who was dozing off again, she strolled into the nursery. The nurse, pleasant and middle-aged, overweight in her too-tight Servant's uniform, smiled at Claree. She was changing a child's soiled diapers. Claree walked casually around the windowless room, studying the seven children, some asleep and some having a snack and some playing with a pile of brightly colored toys.

Two were blond, with blue eyes.

One was a sort of dirty blond, with brown eyes and light brown skin.

Two had black hair in different stages of curliness, medium skin, and changeable eyes, greenish-brownish-gray.

Two were brownish sort of redheads with darker skin and lighter eyes.

All their features looked the same to her, the too-small noses and too-big eyes and pudgy rounded chins of little kids. If these children were two distinct racial groups, Claree couldn't see it. Moreover, she remembered reading that Treemon, which made a religion of tolerance, was comprised of all ethnic groups, as long as the individuals adhered to the Treemon ideals of biological integrity, vegetarianism, personal responsibility, freedom, and all the rest of their admirable creed.

“Mistress,” Claree said to the nurse—it was impossible to address the woman by her first name, which was Ada. Claree was not that far from the Novitiate crèche herself. “Mistress, what do Ignati children look like?”

The woman looked startled. Despite her age, she was only a private first class, which suggested that she was probably not too bright or curious. The Servants had places for such people, of course.

“Why, Ignati are taller than Treemon, of course, but otherwise pretty much the same ... aren't they? I think I was told so.”

“The Ignati are a matriarchy,” Claree said, not because it was relevant but because she wanted to keep the woman talking.

“Why, yes. They don't have sexual equality, like the Treemon. The women rule, the men are warriors. Their families are ... I can't remember the word. But children belong to a family of their mother and her brothers and sisters, not the child's father. They might not even know who he is. They're sexually free, I'm told.” She said this with neither approval nor disapproval.

“They're fierce fighters,” Claree said.

“Oh, yes. They train all their lives for it. Not much literacy, but fierce fighters. Otherwise Treemon would have won the war long ago. Treemon has the more deadly technology; they just don't like to use it. Peaceful people, as long as they're left alone.”

“Ah,” Claree said. “The baby's asleep, can I put it in its basket?”

“Yes. She's a girl, you know.” The woman smiled; to her, the children were people. “Her name is Drina.”

Claree put Drina in her basket and returned to the main room just as Yani came in from outside. He looked hot and dirty, as if he'd covered a lot of ground on foot. Outside, it was full dark.

“Julu!” he called. “Get all personnel out here as soon as they can. Leave just one nurse on duty. Anders, shift signal routing. Make them think we're at B now. Kel ... where's Kel?”

“Here,” he said, materializing beside Claree. “Where's Tuki?”

“Dead,” Yani said. “They shot down the skimmer. Kel, get the—” He suddenly noticed Claree. “You, go in with the children, close the door, and stay there. Now.”

“Yes, Master,” she said automatically, and did as she was told, simmering with resentment. How was she going to learn anything if she was left out of everything?

“What's happening?” the nurse said, alarmed.

“I don't know. Give me something to do.”

For the rest of the evening, Claree grimly tended children. She set them to watching a software cube of some idiotic animals cavorting, and then she helped put them to bed. Eventually she fell asleep on a blanket herself. If any of the children had bad dreams, she didn't hear them cry out.

* * *

In the morning, Brak lay on a cot beside her blanket, heavily asleep.

Claree helped herself to cold food and hot tea from a pile of stuff beside the closed nursery door. She brought tea to Nurse Ada, too, who took it gratefully. “I haven't had any time for tea yet this morning.”

There were only four children in the room, including the boy who had been missing yesterday. Claree sat beside Brak and waited for him to wake.

An hour passed. “What ... who...”

“It's Claree,” she said, managing a smile. “How do you feel?”

“Sick. No, weak. Hungry.”

Nurse Ada came bustling over. “You're hungry, young man, that's good. The post-op drugs these days are amazing! Claree, you brought him something, you're that thoughtful, dear. Give him plenty of water.” A child wailed and she moved away.

“What happened?” Brak demanded.

Claree didn't want to admit that she didn't know. “Here, eat some of this.”

He looked at the bread she held out with distaste. “Is it animal flesh?”

She had no idea. Portable field cookers mixed up nutrients for optimum balance out of whatever raw foodstuffs were put into it, animal or vegetable, then molded and baked the result into “bread.”

“I don't know,” she said truthfully.

“Then I don't want it.”

“You have to eat.”

“Animal flesh? No, I don't. Do you grant animals the right to use you that way?”

Claree wasn't interested in this ideological foolishness. She put down the bread and poured him a cup of water. Brak drank it, wincing as he raised his head. “All right, Claree, what did they do to me?”

“I don't know. They didn't tell me.”

To her surprise, he accepted this. Because the Treemon were so honest, or because he was so willing to believe she was so negligible? Irritation suffused her.

He said, “That woman mentioned ‘post-op drugs.’ Did I have an operation?”

“I told you, I don't know.”

He lay back on his pillow, frowning at her. The door to the nursery opened and two men entered, carrying two sleeping children.

“Put them here,” Ada said. “Everything went all right?”

“Perfectly,” a man said. He looked very tired. “Which three next?”

“Three?” Ada said. “I thought it was only two at once.”

“No time,” the exhausted man said. “One will have to just not get it. Yani says we only have a few more hours at the most before we have to get out.”

“Hours?” Ada said. “But you can't! Recovery—”

“They have to go back, Ada,” the man said. “Don't argue with me, and don't argue with Yani if you value your head. The kids will be all right. But Treemon weapons and detection are better than we thought. We have to get off-planet.”

Claree began, “I have to find Benn Ko—” but nobody was listening to her.

Ada said grimly, “We'll be ready.” Claree saw an Ada she hadn't glimpsed before, the committed Servant of Peace inside the soft baby nurse.

Brak said, “What the dung is going on?”

“Christ,” the man said, lifting a child in either arm, “nobody told him?”

“Yani wants to do it,” the other man said. “He's a special case, after all. And a valuable asset.” The two left, carrying three children.

Claree couldn't sit still. Ignoring Brak's furious questions, she paced over to the child who hadn't been taken. A girl, about three, sitting with a plastic cube into which various plastic shapes were inserted through the correctly shaped hole. Claree watched as the child, with enormous concentration, tried to push a cube through a triangular opening. What had this child missed having done to her?

"He's a special case, after all,” the Servant had said of Brak. Well, wasn't she a special case, too? The Master had said she was. Maybe Yani would enlighten her when he enlightened Brak. Maybe somebody would.

The main room, which Claree crept into cautiously for the first time in sixteen hours, was completely deserted. She stopped on the threshold, shocked.

Blood smeared the floor. Objects were strewn around, some half-packed in canvas bags, some smashed. Two of the big boxes that Claree had seen the two men lug in a few days ago stood in the room, both lids raised. Claree looked inside.

The first one held only smears of blood. In the second was a dead cave hylut. She reached in and touched it; the body felt very cold, although Claree recognized that the cooler had been turned off. Had the animals been brought in for food, to be dumped into the field cooker to supply protein for bread and soup?

No. Snaking from the inside of the cooler were various tubes, probes, injectors still connected to the cave hylut's body, although none were activated. Animal protein for a field cooker was kept cold, but nothing else. Or was it? Claree hadn't taken her Field Survival courses yet; they were for third years.

The door to the back room opened and a woman came out in bloody disposables, which she stripped off as she walked. “All three are going well,” she said to Claree in a contented, exhausted voice. “They don't need me. Wake me when we have to go.” She lay down on a blanket and immediately fell into the dead sleep of someone who'd been awake for days.

Claree recognized her own small canvas bag in the corner. Someone had packed and closed it.

Yani came out of the operating room with two Servants, talking in low tones. Claree couldn't make out the words. When he finished, all three walked toward the nursery, and Yani beckoned Claree to follow.

“Ada, we're going. The other three kids will be out here in a few minutes. It has to be that way. You're on the last skimmer flight, we only have one craft now and can't leave all together, so you've got about an hour. Do what you can for the children. It might take as long as five or six hours for the Treemons to get to them. I don't want any of them so much as mildly dehydrated or scratched from tripping over their own feet. Kel is bringing you soft restraints.”

Ada nodded, her face harder than Claree thought possible.

“Claree,” Yani said, “come over here with Brak.”

Yani took Ada's stool, the only actual seat in the sparsely furnished room, and set it beside Brak's cot. Claree stood.

Brak glared at Yani. “What did you do to me!”

“Made you an asset for peace between your country and the Ignati.”

“I don't understand!”

“Of course you don't.” Yani closed his eyes briefly and Claree was afraid that he, like the doctor, was going to instantly fall asleep. But Yani pulled himself together and gazed at Brak with remote kindness.

“Brak, who is going to win the war?”

“Nobody knows that yet.”

“Wrong. We know. Your people, the Treemon, will win, and pretty soon. You have the technological advantage. Plus the better land, crop yield, mining rights, and literacy.”

“They attacked us first,” Brak said, and Claree saw that somewhere inside himself, this boy felt guilty over the advantages he didn't deny.

“Of course they attacked you,” Yani said, running his hand through his dirty hair. “They have a very high ratio of young men to old rulers, which nearly always leads to war, civil war, or revolution. Demography is destiny.”

Brak gaped at him.

“You thought it was about ideology, didn't you? Freedom versus repression. Education versus ignorance. Equality versus fixed places in a society ruled by the women born to be at the top. It's not. It's just war.”

Claree couldn't restrain herself. “But ... but what have we done to stop it?” What have we done to these kids, and why?

“We couldn't stop the war. Instead we're stopping the deadly aftermath, the violence after the war, by shifting the conflict. It isn't going to be a united Treemon against a conquered Ignatus, not any more. It's going to be a bitterly divided Treemon against itself.”

“Why?” Claree demanded.

“Because we've just violated their deepest beliefs about their most valued possession, their children. Ten of them, nine small appealing ones plus Brak here, have had their biological integrity irreversibly compromised. Their hearts removed, destroyed, and replaced with the hearts of cave hyluts.”

Claree stared at him. She couldn't take it in. Brak began to scream and claw at his chest.

“You ... we ... tortured children?” Claree said.

“No,” Yani said wearily, “they're not tortured, not harmed. The xenotransplant has been treated to eliminate bodily rejection or malfunction. The hylut hearts will function perfectly throughout the children's normal life span. Ada, we need you here. Give the boy a sedative.”

“But... why?”

“Because we're Servants of Peace,” Yani said.

Claree stared at him. The bloody cave hylut in the cooling tank, the blood smeared on the floor ... the baby she'd held on her shoulder, crooning to it, with the heart of that stinking foul carrion-eater....

She cried at him, before she knew she was going to say anything so childish, “Why did you keep me here? Why didn't you send me on to Benn Ko, the way the Master said you would?”

He didn't reply, but she saw the answer in his face: He was Benn Ko. This was whom the Master had wanted her to observe, what he'd wanted her to witness. She turned her head just in time to vomit on the floor and not on Brak, the victim, the accidental sacrifice, the asset to peace.

[Back to Table of Contents]

VI. BRAK

It didn't make sense. Even after the nurse gave him a patch of something and Brak could feel the horror drain away, the panic and anger, he retained the idea of senselessness. The artificial calm was a drug, he knew, but the senselessness was real. He had to understand. Understanding this was the most important thing in the world, because even in his inexperience, he knew that the drugged calm was not going to last.

He had a cave hylut heart in his chest. He was a monster, biologically compromised, a bestial heart from a reeking dangerous animal....

He had to understand.

The man, Yani, seemed to know Brak's need. He said to Claree, “Sit down. No, don't clean up that puke, this is more important. Have some sense of proportion, postulant.”

She did as she was told, looking, Brak thought, as numb as he felt. Had they given her a drug, too, while he was screaming? But wasn't she one of them?

Yani said, “Brak, when your people win this war, which they will do, what do you think will happen?”

He didn't answer, couldn't answer. But he struggled to sit upright on the cot. It suddenly seemed important to sit upright, to not be flat on his back like an infant. No one helped him sit.

“I'll tell you what will happen, Brak. You will try to make Ignatus over into Treemon. You will dismantle their military, break up the rigid autocracy, make men equal to women, try to teach everyone to read well and farm organically and stop eating flesh.”

“So?” Brak said.

“You believe you will replace bad values with good ones. What you will really do is replace the arrogance of power with the arrogance of self-righteousness. And you will cause a revolution, with much more destruction and violence than the war you win. Much more violence. Tens of thousands will die. Because Ignatus does not want your values: individual freedom, personal tolerance, anti-centrism. They are not the only values.”

Brak burst out, “But they're the best!”

Yani smiled wearily. “Perhaps. But freedom, tolerance, anti-centrism ... they leave many people feeling disconnected, with no assured place in a settled authority structure of family and caste.”

“They must make their own places,” Brak said stoutly.

“Some cannot. Some will not. Some will always feel unmoored in such a shifting world. You are very hard on these people, Brak, who include the old and the weak and the untalented and the fearful. You would cut them all adrift from anything they can count on.”

“But—”

“You assume,” Yani went on, as if Brak hadn't spoken, “that everyone must think like your people. You assume that if they could only be shown the error of their ways, they'd want to think like you. Such a stance is wrong, immoral, and dangerous.”

Anger flooded Brak, breaking through the calming drug. “'Immoral?’ The Ignati attacked us!”

“Yes, I know,” Yani said, “but to the Servants of Peace, that's immaterial. What matters is managing further violence so it stays at a minimum.”

“By using violence on me? By cutting open children and replacing their hearts with beasts'?”

Yani shrugged. “Your people's beliefs grant to beasts spiritual equality with yourself, and you locate your souls in your thinking mind, not in your cardiac organ. So why should you mind what we did to you?”

Brak gaped at him. Claree burst out, “It's only that same old shit—'The end justifies the means'!”

Yani smiled. “Very good, Claree. Sometimes it does.”

“No,” she said. “No!”

“Not even to prevent or curtail genocide? Brak, do you know what will happen in Treemon as a result of what we've done? Your people will be told in a few hours. They will come to get you kids. Then a tremendous public attention will focus on you: on the villainy of what we've done, the monsters we've created, the children who are those monsters but are still their children. Factions will form. Beliefs will be severely questioned. Unity and complacency will both fall like huge asteroids in the middle of your puritanical society, sending up clouds of dirt and grit. The self-righteous purists will never be able to be so pure or so self-righteous again. One of those little girls with a cave hylut's heart is your lieutenant governor's daughter.”

Brak swung his legs off the cot. Dizzy for a moment, he could nonetheless sit up, like a real person.

“Treemon,” Yani continued, “will never again be able to make as united, as self-righteous, as arrogant an assault on remaking Ignatus. Ignatus will not in consequence revolt quite so hard, and Treemon will not respond with the genocide that isn't ever far from the puritanically self-righteous.”

Brak said hotly, “My people would never—”

“So you think. Are you going to tell me a boy like you never had his own doubts about this war?”

The wamu in the mountains, the shocked look on his friends’ faces when he talked to them, his mother's averted gaze ... all less than a week ago. Brak said nothing.

Yani was relentless. “What do you say to that, young Brak?”

“I say that you Servants of Peace could become as dangerous as the violence you're trying to prevent.”

“Oh, gods, yes,” Yani said, suddenly looking a decade older. “Don't you think we know that?”

“I don't know,” Brak said. It seemed to him, teetering on the edge of a cot in this unreal place with these unimaginable people, that he was no longer sure of much of anything.

“I know!” Claree cried. “Yani, Benn Ko, whoever you are—I'm resigning from the Servants of Peace! Right now. This minute. You're evil!”

“Are you sure of that? We're not the ones killing anybody. We never do.”

Claree burst into tears. Yani didn't try to help her. He gazed at her with tenderness, but it was Brak who staggered unsteadily to his feet and put his arms around the sophisticated girl from off-world, the girl who had talked to him so joyously about the Servants of Peace over the dead body of a cave hylut. She felt bony in his arms, a fledgling bird. Brak looked at Yani. “She'll tell the galaxy what you're really like.”

“I hope so,” Yani said. “That too is part of the process.”

“What ‘process'?” Brak spat. Holding Claree emboldened him.

“The process of preventing ideologies from becoming too rigid, and the right from becoming too righteous. Muddling things up. Balance, some might call it.”

“Or corruption!” Brak said, and the trembling girl went still in his arms.

“Corruption is a less intrusive way of intervention than is violence.” Yani stretched his arms over his head. “I must go soon. Claree?”

“Not with you! Never!”

“Your choice, postulant. Although I'm sorry for it. Brak, your people will be here for you and the children later today. We'll give them exact coordinates, once we're well away. Until then, you and Claree will need to manage the little ones. And eventually, you know, your folks will accept you as if the xenotransplant had never happened. They'll have to. Their own values of tolerance say so. And through that, they'll end up accepting a great many other aberrations, as well.”

Brak didn't answer. He watched Yani stroll off, and a complex feeling stirred in him.

“I hate them!” Claree cried, pulling away from him. “Evil, immoral ... and I never knew how corrupt they really are! I never knew! Corrupt!”

“Yes,” Brak agreed, and then, from some depths of drug and thought and emotion, “No. Claree—”

But she had begun sobbing again, and she wasn't listening to him.

Brak, dizzy, sat again on the edge of the cot. What was he going to do with her? Take her to his mother, of course. And if she wanted to stay in Treemon—but she was an off-worlder! And yet, looking at her, he had a sudden perception that even though she ate flesh, she would fit in on a Treemon farm or in a Treemon city. It had something to do with her being so straight-forward, so single-minded, so sure of what's always right. Claree might even be happy in Treemon, might feel at home.

As he never had, not really. And now he would fit in even less.

Brak gazed after Yani's exhausted, retreating figure. The Servants of Peace owed Brak, now. They had fouled him, used him, turned him from being a person to being an asset. Oh, yes, they owed him.

He wondered if they ever took postulants from backwater worlds like Treemon, and how old you had to be to join.