Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (45 page)

It was a satisfyingly large crowd, more people than she’d expected. Farmers had come in from the countryside, considerately leaving their elephants in a stockyard pen downwind. Several ceramics workers still wore their tough Threadmores, blackened with foundry soot and fastened with the new ceramic buttons from Chu Corporation. The New Quakers, as always, clustered together at one side. Several Arab women sat among them. Now that the medina was gone, the Quaker-sponsored course at the Exchange Center in sewing with bone needles had proved surprisingly popular with the older Arab women.

Behind her on the platform Jake called, “Remember to yell, Alex. No mike.”

“Don’t yell like that,” Lucy said severely. “You already sound hoarse!”

Alex ignored them both. She scanned the crowd to get a rough count. Maybe as many as three thousand. Of course, the herders couldn’t leave their glennings nor the breeders their frabbits, on which so much depended. Clothing, meat, sundries like the bone needles. And runners, the young people who in the absence of trams or horses carried goods among the nodes of this looser, more far-flung Mira City, were mostly in the field. But other industries had declared the day a holiday and closed entirely. The Scientists’ League was there, and the Carpenters’ Guild, and the flourishing Zhou Lighting Company, which had scored such an early success with oil lamps that it had cornered the market.

A breeze blew cooking smells to the platform. The communal kitchen had been working for days to prepare this feast. Every ceramic pot on every ceramic stove simmered with spicy delicacies. Alex’s mouth watered.

The band struck up Greentrees’ newly adopted anthem, “We’re Still Here.” Alex knew all the words, which were ungainly and moving, but she couldn’t distinguish them over the instruments. Wood flutes, a ceramic horn of some type, a few guitars, and a drum. Several people stood; more didn’t.

A ripple ran over the crowd and people spun around and laughed. Two messages were coming in simultaneously. Against the clear eastern sky, green smoke puffs—the coloring was another Zhou Company success—rose. Alex, like everyone else over the age of four, read the green symbols easily. They came from the upriver Hamoud Fish Farms.

(fish) (unable) (ship) (greetings) (as a result of the foregoing) (Hamoud staff) (ship) (greetings) (Mira City)

What made it funny was the other message, flashing from tower to tower via Jon McBain’s polished glass-and-ceramic mirrors all the way from the coastal ichthyologist research station:

(fish) (Mira Ichythyologist Research Station) (ship) (greetings) (Mira City)

Alex smiled. The joke was pretty lame, but laughter hadn’t been too plentiful in the last two and a half years. Too many people had died. But more had survived than she’d dared hope, those who had evacuated Mira when they were supposed to and then stayed hidden during the brief, terrible war with the space Furs. About half of Greentrees’ population had slowly staggered back from the places they’d fled to. More had chosen to move even farther away and build new frontier towns.

At first there had been no housing for the returnees, no hospital for the sick, little food, and no metal to try to re-create the familiar. Everything had had to be rethought. They could not have done it at all in a harsher environment. But this was Greentrees: lush, generous, beautiful wherever humanity had not scarred her.

So now Alex looked out at wooden structures with dovetailed joints; stone structures with that old Roman staple, the key arch; tents and lodges decorated with Chinese characters. This Mira City had none of the soaring grace and ecologically correct harmony she had once envisioned. This Mira City was eclectic, crude, makeshift, evolving, vital.

And here.

The band had long since finished its anthem. “Begin!” Jake called. “What are you waiting for?”

Alex held up her hand. The crowd quieted. She picked out individual faces: Star Chu. Kent Landers. Savannah Cutler. Salah Hadijeh. Ben Stoller and Natalie Bernstein. And off to one side, River Cloud with three young braves, all being much admired by a mixed gaggle of teenage girls.

But it wasn’t the faces that were here that Alex proposed to talk about.

“As mayor of Mira City, I’d like to welcome you all to the ceremony commemorating the fifty-third anniversary of the First Landing. But before I talk about the wonderful things in our past and in our future, I want to begin as every public meeting in Mira City begins.

“So that we remember them always, and remember what we owe them, these are the martyrs who gave their lives so that we might live in peace on Greentrees:

“Lau-Wah Mah.”

The crowd echoed solemnly, “We remember Lau-Wah Mah.”

“Nan Frayne.”

“We remember Nan Frayne.”

“Ashraf Shanti.”

“We remember Ashraf Shanti.”

“Duncan Martin.” Even now her throat tightened at the surname.

“We remember Duncan Martin.”

“Siddalee Brown.”

“We remember Siddalee Brown.”

“Mary Pesci and Mesbah Shanab.”

“We remember Mary Pesci and Mesbah Shanab.”

“Burning Tree of the Cheyenne.”

“We remember Burning Tree of the Cheyenne.”

“Grandmother of the wild Furs.”

“We remember Grandmother of the wild Furs.”

“Miranda of the wild Furs …”

Miranda. Alex could never escape memory.
“History defines us,”
Julian always said. Duncan Martin on a vanished stage, in his thrilling voice:” ’O brave new world that has such people in it…’” Alex looked out across the solemn, chanting crowd.

“We remember Miranda of the wild Furs.”

Such people in it…

Yes.