Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  He looked directly at her for the first time in the interview. “Good thing you didn’t. You look better as a Nordic blonde.” Catharin restrained an inexplicable impulse to smile. Devreze rose and paced around the chair. He moved the way he talked, with abruptness, nervous energy. She scrolled to the top of the medical file to verify that he had blue eyes naturally, not courtesy of cosmetic alterations.

  “The upshot is, what I’ve haven’t had, or done, or at least had offered to me, isn’t worth having,” Devreze concluded.

  Catharin saw what the lower levels of Assessment had meant by, in Bix’s words, max disqualifications. Commitment to the starship mission—or close relatives so committed—constituted a believable, solid reason for people to leave Earth forever. Ennui was not a good reason. “Surely you could find another innovation to make.”

  “Not legally.”

  Catharin frowned. “Altering the human germ line is tightly regulated. Is that what you mean?”

  “It’s the last biggest challenge I haven’t met,” he said.

  “In other words, you find your playground too confining,” she said, her tone biting.

  Devreze sat down. “I fear stagnation. When you’re a scientist and peak early, sometimes you never do anything wonderful ever again.” He steepled his hands and gazed into the space between them. He had long, sculpted fingers. His hands should have belonged to a surgeon. “Altering terrestrial animals for alien conditions—that’s a challenge I’ve not had. And won’t, unless I go with the starship. I could live for that.”

  “Could you die for that? The journey will last almost three centuries. Colonists and crew will be in stasis, which is a cold suspended animation. It is not a kind of sleep. There is a small but significant chance of dying in stasis. Never coming out alive.”

  “So, it’s a risk. So’s staying here and being put in the science hero’s trophy case.”

  She had to be relentless at this point in the interview. But the job of making people realize what the mission entailed was easier for assessors who were not going themselves. She had to name the same truths that haunted her every night at three a.m. “Everyone you’ve ever known on Earth will be gone when you are revived. They won’t be just too far away to talk to. Died, buried, and disintegrated back into the molecules they were made of.” She paused, pressing her lips together.

  He bowed his head, forefinger and thumb clamped to the bridge of his nose. “I’m not much of a social animal. But there are people who mean something to me. I understand you.”

  “And every home you’ve ever known . . . .” Her voice was rough; her own raw emotion showed. But all that mattered now was that he understand the enormity of what he wanted to do. “Everything will be gone.”

  He nodded.

  “Even the grass and the trees. After several more centuries of ecological disaster on Earth, the planet will be different.”

  “That’s not a reason to stay,” he said.

  “I know.” After moments of silence, she went on, “As for the new world, astronomers have located a planet much like Earth, orbiting a star fifty light-years from here.” She found it easier to talk about the new world than the old one. “The chances that it has a large moon are more than ninety percent—so far so good—the chance of at least a primitive ecosphere, more than fifty percent. That means seasons, blue-green algae, and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere are probable. It does not mean we can expect trees, birds, flowers—that kind of ecosystem has a very low probability.” But oh, how we hope for it! “The likelihood of intelligent life is less than a millionth of one percent.”

  Devreze shrugged. “Fine. Nobody to argue with us about our right to invade them.”

  “What I’m saying is, it won’t be paradise. Only after generations of terraforming will it be pretty. You won’t live long enough to see forests in the open air.”

  “I can live without trees.” Then he gave her another direct blue gaze. “What about you? Are you tired of crowded cities and dying forests?”

  “That’s one reason for people to leave Earth. But it’s not mine.”

  “Then . . . ?” His smile was surprisingly winsome. “I told you the truth, even though it’s not what you wanted to hear.”

  Catharin said,”Civilization is diseased, and the diseases are very advanced. War, pollution, and oppression are the kind of things I mean. Overpopulation is another.”

  “I can’t help that,” he said offhandedly, “legally.”

  “Nor I, nor anyone else. We can’t save the world. But if we start afresh on a new world—with the all of the lessons we’ve learned here, and science, but without the bloody history that keeps repeating itself—we can make a better civilization.”

  Joseph Devreze laughed suddenly and sharply, an outburst of either scorn or pain. “I hope you have better medical judgment than philosophical, Doctor!”

  “What?”

  “Civilization is the disease.”

  Catharin felt her face heat with a flush. “I think not. I do not regard a patient with cancer as disease itself. And I don’t see the blight of cities as anything more—or less—than disease. It may not be curable at this stage. But it’s preventable in a different future.”

  He tilted his head, listening with an intensity that gave her a quick thrill of satisfaction. Then he countered, “If you’d ever seen the dark hearts of the big cities under the power towers, you’d know it’s not the moral equivalent of heartworm. It’s the heart of darkness.”

  She wanted to retort, How do you know, you sheltered scientist? But she just held up her hand. “We’ll continue this discussion later. Much later.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re in. But you were almost too late, as today is the last day for colonists to report to the ship. Take the next shuttle up.” She shut the visuals off.

  He’d drawn out of her the ideals that she usually kept to herself. And he’d attacked them. Fight-or-flight adrenaline coursed through her system. She would have preferred to fight. It was an act of will for her to assign Devreze to the appropriate place in the colonial force. Tier One.

  According to the plans in the Mission Book, she would be revived as soon as the ship found its star. Only later, after the colony was founded, would the people in Tier One be revived. So Devreze would come out of cryostasis ten years later than she.

  Catharin tried to remember when she had ever found a total stranger—much less an objectionably arrogant one—so attractive. She drew a blank. Maybe never. She shook her head, baffled by the coils of coincidence and necessity.

  Catharin’s days had been getting longer and harder, and this was the worst yet. From 0600 until 1700 hours, Catharin worked in the hospital in the starship as most of the starship’s crew were initiated into stasis. All the while, the distinctive smell of a brand-new spacecraft—pristine plastic and fresh paint and sealants breezed by the circulating air system—reminded Catharin that this was no ordinary hospital, or day.

  And then the hospital had been shut down, until it would be needed again to populate a colony on the other side of the stars. Catharin said good-bye to the team of medical personnel who had put all of the colonists and most of the crew into stasis. Most of the medics left on shuttles that would take them home to Earth.

  As a primary crew member, Catharin possessed the keys to the kingdom of the starship. In the lowest level of the deserted hospital, she let herself into the maintenance passageways. In a longitudinal passageway, she started to run.

  The passageway seemed to curve upward, reflecting the curvature of the spherical starship. The ship was spinning now, which created a kind of artificial gravity, and Catharin quickly tired, but she kept running—toward something scheduled for twenty minutes from now, and into the exhaustion that would let her tolerate that event.

  Smooth and well lighted, the passageway had system control panels at fifty-meter intervals, and the new-spaceship smell. This ship’s name was Aeon. A Greek word; a reminder of the bright beginning
of civilization when frail sailing craft sailed on the Aegean Sea, in the light of an impossibly distant moon. Aeon was made of that very moon—most of the ship’s structural materials had been mined on the Moon and ferried to the shipyard here at L5. This was the greatest machine ever built. But not the most sophisticated. In the larger scheme of things, Aeon was nothing more than a sturdy packing crate, meant to carry the powers of terraforming—genetic and environmental engineering, nanoscale biological and material science, the seeds of ecosystem, and human beings—to the stars. It would be a very rough and perilous trip. Just get us there safe, Catharin repeated, like a mantra as she ran. Just get us there safe.

  The spin-gravity lessened as she ran out of the ship’s equatorial region, toward the north pole. Panting, Catharin checked her watch. She would not make it to the crew level in time. She was still breathing hard as she emerged from the chase network near a transport level window. Now that the ship had spin-gravity, she could not simply float close to the middle of the window to look out at a wide swath of space. There was down now. The transport level window reminded her of church architecture. A window that made you see out and up.

  Visible upward was the enormous bulk of the star shield at the north end of the ship and a rectangle of space. The regular spin of the starship took the window past the gleaming, angular shipyards at L5. Catharin sat down. She bowed her head, not wanting to cross gazes with the personnel congregating near the window.

  A cool, stiff hand touched her shoulder. “May I join you?” Chief Donovan asked. He settled down, cross-legged and still barefoot. “I hope your call the other day went well.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Look now, there’s the Moon in our window.” Luna arched across the view, its apparent speed reflecting the brisk rotation of the starship. “You expect to see one like it, I understand, when the journey’s done.”

  Catharin nodded. “It’s vital that the new world have a moon.”

  “Our own surely has an ugly face.” He spoke with a quiet intensity that was more than conversational. “Sometimes, Doctor, Nature throws problems at you, out of the blue—or out of the black, as the case may be, like the meteors that smashed into the Moon and the Earth, early on.” He waved toward the window with one artificial hand.

  “Short-term exposure to environmental toxins, in utero?” she asked.

  “Yes. It affected only my arms, not my legs or my brain. But I’ve found that doctors aren’t as uneasy about me as most other folks. A bit more likely to listen to what I have to say, rather than just stare at what they see.”

  With white hair that gleamed in the starlight, he was too old to go to the stars. And so he was sending his thoughts instead. Catharin asked, “Is there something I should hear from you?”

  He made a small satisfied movement. “My dear mother always told me, ‘You must embrace what God gives you, even if you’re given no arms.’“

  Catharin tilted her chin up. Even as a child, she’d always reacted with that gesture, silently objecting, at what sounded unreasonable. Today, adult, she said, “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well and good, but in my own experience, Doctor, the Universe, or God, or Nature, name it what you will, does throw problems at you, and she doesn’t seem to care who you are, or how many she strikes down. But what happens after that, depends.”

  “On what?”

  He flexed his hairless hands, deliberately. “Attitude, Doctor. Looking for the blessing behind the curse. Feet as dexterous as hands are an asset in space, and I’ve had a long and fine career up here. Only, you must remember that you just can’t say to the meteor, begone. Or wish arms where there are none. I’ve decided that was what my mother really meant for me to hear. Some things will never be the way they might have been, so you must accept them the way they are. Plans are good, training better yet, but not if they blind you and bind you in the face of the unexpected.”

  Numb, Catharin nodded.

  A pleasant, androgynous voice resonated through the level. “Attention, please. The shutters will close in ten minutes.”

  Most of the murmuring crowd here were Transport workers, wearing sturdy coveralls. Self-conscious in her thin blue shorts and shirt piped in red, Catharin felt grateful for Chief Donovan’s company. The starship would have to leave the Donovans behind. And take an arrogant Devreze. It was grossly unfair. But stasis would have deleterious effects on the human body, worse with increased age of the subject. A strict age cutoff had been imposed on colonists and crew alike.

  “The shutters are closing.”

  Catharin shivered. She had been dreading this moment for days. Of all final preparations, this one bespoke finality most clearly for her.

  Massive shutters crept from each side toward the middle to mesh together, to shield the window from the hazards of the interstellar medium. There was a subaudible sound, or vibration, that propagated through the superstructure. Catharin felt light-headed, caught herself hyperventilating. No, she thought, I can’t afford claustrophobia. Not now. It’s not being trapped. She stared at the black window that now had only a jagged thread of stars running down the middle of it. It’s protection against what the universe might throw at us. She fought for calm and for some kind of proactive stance, not just sitting here being afraid. She heard herself say, “Thank you for your advice. I’m going to take it right away.”

  “I beg your pardon? I thought it was the sort of advice to keep on hand for a rainy day.”

  “We’ve been doing simulations of different planetfall scenarios. But we haven’t had one where the universe throws such a curve at us that we can’t save the mission in its nominal form. And we need that kind of attitude check. The Sim Supervisor is a friend of mine. I’m going to ask him to arrange something.” Catharin added, “Talk about rainy days—the Sim Supe can make it pour.”

  As often as she sat at the Life Systems station, and as intently as she played her part in the simulations, Catharin had never felt jaded in the control center, never failed to be awed. The control center of Aeon was a vast, vaulted room with massively scaled elements. The primary crew stations rimmed a large, elevated platform, behind which one high wall was taken up by a visual screen. Nicknamed the Big Picture, the main screen showed pictures and diagrams of the ship and its situation in vast scope and detail. Subsidiary stations were serried in rows along the length of the center, and screens filled the walls beside them with floor-to-ceiling information visuals.

  A window in the Big Picture showed a small pair of points of light, blue and white, representing a new planet with its moon. What dominated the Big Picture was the Sun—close up, brilliant, with turbulent chromosphere and several sunspots.

  Not the Sun, Catharin corrected her thinking. A strange star that looks and behaves like the Sun, so far. In simulation, Aeon at perihelion was swinging around the new sun on its way to rendezvous with the new world. Primary and secondary crew were on station. In the gallery, a dozen or so observers took copious notes for the debriefing later. Catharin noticed the white hair of Gerry Donovan in top row of the gallery.

  Captain Bixby paced between the Command and Flight stations. He called to Catharin, “Medical, how’s stasis?”

  “Stasis systems are solidly cold, no hot spots,” Catharin reported. Her workstation screen was crammed with simulated reports from the stasis vaults in the bowels of the ship.

  “Life support?”

  Miguel Torres-Mendoza, who shared the Life Systems station with Catharin, said calmly, “All is well.”

  “Not for long,” came a whisper over the medical link. Catharin recognized the voice of the Sim Supervisor, audible only in her headset. “Ready for the show, Dr. Gault?”

  She double-clicked her microphone back and looked up at the image of the sun in the Big Picture as the Sim Supervisor altered it. On the limb of the sun, the edge of the lake of fire, sunspots multiplied in number. An incalescent ribbon—brilliantly hot—wound among the dark, cool spots like a snake.

 
; The ship had autonomous, watchful instruments and an Intelligence to run them. But the ship did not sound an alarm. No one in the control center remarked on the altered sun either. The Sim Supe’s whisper told her, “Oh, thank you. You’ve helped me catch everybody off guard.”

  Bix turned toward the Engineering station. “Any heat and tidal effects registering on the ship, Orlov?”

  “Nominal,” said the chief engineer, a square-jawed man with thick eyebrows and hair going gray around the edges.

  Behind the spots and the bright ribbon, a spike of sun-stuff stood out against the edge of black space. The Sim Supe morphed the rim of the sun into a solar prominence. As the ship hurtled around the sun, the prominence grew more conspicuous. The flare ribbon didn’t get your attention, so look at me, it said.

  Bix turned on his heels, casually glanced up at the Big Picture, and did a double take. “Omigod!” Other people made puzzled noises, but the gears in Bix’s head were ratcheting to high, Catharin thought, observing his body language. “All stations! Power down all systems down to minimum. Shut whatever you can all the way off! Pilot! Turn us so the star shield is facing the far limb of the sun!”

  “Uh, Roger!” replied Joel Foster at Flight station. A window materialized in the Big Picture to show Aeon superimposed on a coordinate grid. “Twenty-six point five minutes.” Aeon was not a nimble spacecraft. You might as readily turn a small mountain.

  Bix growled, “Make it under twenty.”

  “Captain? That solar prominence is only a hundred thousand kilometers high, or so,” someone on a subsidiary station said. “We won’t run into it.”

  “It’s not just a prominence. It’s a solar flare,” Bix retorted. “Dead ahead.”

  A murmur of consternation swept through the control center. The observers in the gallery leaned closer, intent.

  “The guardian code didn’t know to look out for this kind of event either!” Bix bent over the Command station interface—a rugged but failsafe keyboard. He hammered it with his fingers, overriding the programming. Alarm lights and signals sounded all over the control center.