Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  He smiled faintly. “Cat. Hi. Ouch.”

  The men donned their flights coveralls with pained groans and expletives. Then Joel laughed. “We’re here!”

  “We hope,” Catharin said.

  “Let’s go find out,” Bix grunted. The three of them stumbled out of the stasis room. “What’s this g-force?” Bix asked.

  “A sixth g or so,” said Joel. “Which means we’re still accelerating.”

  The starship had slowly, steadily accelerated ever since it left Earth, and must have reached a velocity of—the numbers slipped from the grasp of Catharin’s mind. What mattered was to start the countdown to braking, when the Ship would let the new sun claim it.

  They staggered around the Axis, the huge column that ran down into the heart of the ship. Bix led the way through the hatch into the flight deck. He and Joel began activating the flight control stations. Hundreds of informative little lights came on.

  “Wanna view, Cat?” Joel flipped a switch.

  Bix growled, “I want coffee.”

  “The first thing you’ll get is destasis medicine,” Catharin said.

  On the far wall, a string of stars appeared. The string broadened as the shieldshutter rolled back. Catharin approached the window, a deepwalled slit in the ship’s hull.

  The starship Aeon was a sphere with a great spike of an engine driving it. Opposite the engine, Aeon had a wide, convex shield that the hurtling ship presented to the hazards of deep space. The crew level lay in the valley between the star shield and the orb where ten thousand colonists lay in stasis. Catharin itched to know how the colonists had fared. But it was too early to check. The Book said: first, ascertain that the Starship has reached its destination. Joel and Bix were tasked with that.

  At present, up—toward the star shield and the ship’s north pole—was the direction of the ship’s ongoing acceleration. Looking down through the flight deck window, Catharin saw Aeon’s bulk as a wide horizon against the drifting stars. Aeon did not shine like its depiction on the coverall shoulder patches. It looked tarnished, not new anymore.

  “Chronometer on,” Bix said.

  “Twentythree seventytwo,” Joel said. “About right.” Nearly three centuries of star flight had aged the skin of Aeon.

  A chill clung to the window’s glass and made the nearby air feel cold. The ship’s hull had cold-soaked in the sunless spaces between the stars. Three days ago, the machinery had automatically begun warming up only the crew level. Pumping livable heat into all of the environs of Aeon would take a full year and a sun.

  “Time for the autoobservatory’s report,” Bix said. The three of them exchanged tense glances.

  A new sun flooded into the window with light that flashed across the flight deck. Eyes watering from the glare, Catharin dimly saw Bix switch on the auto-observatory interface.

  Then Bix swore. The silence cracked like shattered glass. “It isn’t here.”

  “What! It is the wrong star?!” Joel demanded.

  Catharin asked, “The planet isn’t here?”

  “Right star. Planet, too. It’s the moon,” Bix said. “The goddamned moon’s not here.”

  Catharin’s mind skidded on slick, hard incomprehension. There won’t be any music here—No. Music had nothing to do with it. Without a moon, there would never be seasons here. There would be no Spring.

  “We better defrost reinforcements,” Joel said. He sounded shaken.

  The galley smelled of coffee. The two mission specialists did not partake; they had to drink their destasis medicine first. Joel summarized the situation for them. “Repeat. No moon, much less a good-sized one,” he concluded, and glowered into his coffee.

  The planetologist’s name was Lary Siroky-Scheidt. Lary’s sour face showed that he found the destasis medicine, the situation, or both, unpalatable.

  Nguyen El Ae, the other specialist, said weakly, “That is very bad.”

  Bix said, “Remember, the Book does not assume that we have no choice but to stay here. It has several fallback options. We can select from those if we have to, and go back into stasis while the Ship goes on.”

  Joel relaxed a bit. “Yeah.”

  Catharin almost objected immediately. Instead, she glanced around the small group. Nguyen had youth in his favor. So did Catharin herself. Not so Joel with his saltandpepper hair. Lary had saltandcayenne, and Bix’s years had made his hair solidly gray. The dangers of stasis increased with the subject’s age.

  “The options are why we thawed you out, Nguyen,” Bix said. “You’re the right man to evaluate three centuries of autoastronomy, and tell us which direction looks the best these days.”

  PhD in astrophysics, PhD in computer science, genuine genius: Nguyen was the right man for that job. At that moment he looked more like a boy: young, slight, rumpled, and plainly feeling ill.

  Catharin protested, “But we came so far, to this one place, because we thought there’d be a moon. It took us so long to get here!”

  “Not in astronomical time,” Joel said, and asked Lary, “What could happen to a moon in just a few centuries?”

  “Well. Something could. Happen, I mean.” Clutching his drink, Lary took a swig. “Yech! Collision with something big. Or close encounter with a stray black hole, tidal forces breaking up the moon. Or tearing it out of its orbit. That sort of thing’s not likely, but possible.”

  But unfair! Catharin had to bite back an outburst of protest. They had come so far, so successfully; they had known what to expect as no explorers ever before. How dare the universe do this to us?

  Lary said, “No moon means the planet has an unstable axis of rotation. And that in turn means no regular, predictable seasons in the temperate zones, plus a catastrophically erratic climate across time.” He sounded alert and coherent. But too chipper, as though he were talking about a hypothetical world, and not their lost future.

  Joel drained his coffee cup and hurled it toward the used-dish receptacle. “It was here.”

  Bix nodded. “But the moon was right at the resolution limit of the visual interferometry.”

  “Before we left, the astronomers observed this planet and said the orbital perturbations verified the planet had a moon. They were sure the moon was here. Instead, we get nothing!”

  “Not nothing,” Bix corrected him. “The planet is in the habitable zone, though towards the outer edge of it. Bigger than Mars and warmer too.”

  “That’s hopeful,” Lary said.

  Joel shook his head. “We can’t come this far and settle on something not much better than Mars.”

  “Apart from Earth, Mars was more habitable than any other body in the Solar System,” Lary said testily. “I should know. I was born and raised there.”

  “Not good enough,” Joel said. “We’ve got to push on.”

  Nguyen drained his glass, put it down, and closed his eyes, evidently fighting queasiness. Catharin watched him with concern. Then the empty glass distracted her. It crept across the table on its own, like a snail, on a trail of condensation.

  Joel noticed her consternation. He pushed the glass back. “Ship spins—gyroscopic stabilization.” That was right, Catharin remembered now, and loose objects would migrate outward. She wondered if other knowledge that should have been immediate and obvious was no longer so, in her mind, or in the minds of her colleagues, after the long stasis.

  Bix said, “All right. Given that none of us have gotten our hands dirty with the uptotheminute facts in our areas—how do we feel about what to do? Cat?”

  “The bottom line in my field is, first, do no harm,” she replied. “I’ve got to be sure that more time in stasis won’t damage everyone.”

  “Joel, I take it you’d want to go on.”

  Lary burst out at Joel, “Be realistic! The best we can expect to find is a barren world that won’t be greened up until long after we’re deceased.”

  “Maybe, but I want my great-grandkids to have woods,” Joel said. “And seasons. Not just altiplano grass and twenty kinds
of sand.”

  Lary snapped, “People on Mars don’t feel deprived!”

  “I wonder . . . .” Nguyen ventured. “Was it meant to happen this way?”

  “How so?” asked Bix.

  “They sent us here, but there’s nothing but further possibilities. But the auto-observatory is very good. Maybe the Aeon Foundation meant for us to look at the stars here and figure out the next move for ourselves—”

  Lary snorted. “This is not a guessing game!”

  “Okay, Lary wants to stay. I take it you’re inclined to go on, Nguyen,” Bix said.

  Nguyen nodded with stiff dignity.

  Catharin said, “Bix?”

  He sighed. “I’d like to keep going. But we’ve got ten thousand passengers down there. Your point about the stasis doing harm is well taken.” Then he said, “Two to go and two to stay.”

  According to the Book, the primary crew, Bix and Joel and Catharin, could revive any or all of the mission specialists, if necessary. But they were obligated to keep the total number of voices, besides that of the Captain, even. In the event that the crew found itself evenly split on a crucial decision, the Captain would cast the deciding vote. Catharin did not envy Bix if it came to that.

  “When’s our best window for braking?” Bix asked Joel.

  Joel relocated to the galley’s workstation. “Fifth day from today.”

  “All right, that’s our deadline. We’ve got to decide what to do by then. Cat, have we been up long enough to tackle the stasis status report? Five days could be a tight deadline, and the sooner we get moving the better,” he added.

  “Yes, I think we can handle it now—or a least, I think we must,” she replied.

  Joel pulled the report up and scanned the workstation screen. He said, “Damn. Cat—”

  The hair on the back of Catharin’s neck prickled with dread.

  “We may have a problem. If this report is true—I mean, if there’s not a data error—there’s a hot spot in the passenger decks.”

  The Axis contained an elevator shaft. After centuries unused, its door opened and closed with a fine whisper. “Level Eighteen—about a third of the way to the south pole,” Catharin murmured, and punched a button. The ‘vator shivered. It started downward. “Brr.”

  “Crank up to mediumhigh,” Bix suggested.

  Catharin adjusted her coldsuit’s temperature control upward. The ‘vator was dimly lit. Bars of light marched up the wall, indicating vertical motion. Reflections fluttered on Bix’s faceplate.

  “I hope the hot spot isn’t real,” Catharin said.

  “One way to find out.” Bix leaned at ease against the ‘vator wall. “Anything you need to tell me that you didn’t in the galley?”

  “No, Bix. I am worried about the consequences of the stasis. Any physician would be. It’s never been done for this long before. In observing us, though,” she added, “I haven’t seen signs of deterioration, physical or psychological.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Since I may be the canary in the mine shaft, I’m glad to hear it.” Older than the rest of them by a decade, he knew all too well that ill effects of stasis would probably show up in him first.

  Catharin felt mild queasiness in her stomach, and it had been there since she woke up, but it did not qualify as a serious symptom. She stopped the ‘vator at Stasis Level 11. “This is well removed from the hot spot. Let’s see how things are going here.”

  The sensors said that the air on the other side of the ‘vator door was good—pressure and composition normal, no contaminants. The door opened into a long dim corridor. Near the door, a medical station waited for them. She turned it on. Hundreds of pinpoint lights appeared, nearly all of them green. “This agrees with what the status report said about this level.”

  “Nominal isn’t news,” Bix grunted.

  “There’s a casualty.” A point of red glinted among the green. She displayed the dead passenger’s stasis history in detail. “We expected a very low, but real, casualty rate, because of unforeseeable problems in how some people’s bodies are affected by stasis. It’s much like the risk of someone dying under general anesthesia—a very low risk but a certain one.”

  Catharin bit her lip to hold in her anger at the implacable odds. She remembered her hospital internship in Baltimore. She had hated losing patients, no matter how normal, or inevitable, the processes that led to death. No matter how negligible the death toll in the greater scheme of things.

  “Think the rest of ‘em are good for the whole millennium?”

  “I can’t answer that yet. Besides, the whole hypothesis that stasis should be good for a thousand years before deterioration gets serious—may be wrong. It’s never been tested. And it may be colored by romantic millennialism. I don’t trust it.” She ran her hand over the board with its emerald points of light and the single, accusatory red one.

  “They all knew the risk. And for it they expect something better than a bigger, warmer edition of Mars.” Bix sighed.

  They reentered the ‘vator to go deeper into the ship. The ‘vator coasted into Stasis Level 17. This time they hesitated when the door opened for them.

  Catharin became aware of something different in the air, a frigid foul odor of decay. She caught herself stepping not out, but closer to Bix. “Do you smell it?”

  “Something stinks.” He strode out of the ‘vator to confront the med station. The problem indicator had come on. Bix activated the board. It lit up green with an awful red wound. Red pinpoints, a mass of them, haloed with amber, glared on the green field.

  Shocked, Catharin blurted, “Almost all of Wedge T!” Her voice shook.

  “Outside of T?”

  “Showing green.” Swiftly she read the status of some of the green points. “I can’t be sure the rest are okay until I check more closely.”

  Bix glared at the board. “If this icebox is faulty, then that’s it,” he said abruptly. “We stay.”

  Feeling sick and cold, Catharin nodded.

  3 Vandal Stars

  Compared to the depths of the ship, the flight deck looked brilliantly busy. Catharin and Bix took off their helmets, unsealed and unzipped their coldsuits. “Seventeen Wedge T’s dead, more or less,” Bix announced.

  Lary and Nguyen dropped what they were doing, stunned. Catharin groaned privately. Too harsh, Bix! Somebody might have had a relative there.

  “Med log, Cat,” said the Captain.

  She took a seat at her station. Her fingers trembled, uncooperative, as she opened the automatic medical log.

  “Lary. How’s it look?” Bix sounded gruff.

  “The planet’s orbit is quite elliptical, and that means we’d have seasons of a sort, a range from something like summer on Mars to winter in Anchorage.”

  “Nguyen?” Bix meant to nail them all to their jobs to keep them from dwelling on thoughts about a dead Wedge. Catharin would rather have talked about the loss, openly and now.

  Nguyen answered, “The autoobservatory shows a binary star very nearby.”

  “So?” said Joel, entering the flight deck. With a little salute, he acknowledged the return of Catharin and Bix from their expedition to the passenger decks.

  Nguyen explained, “It is a tightly bound pair of white dwarfs—very dense, very faint stars. They were observed from Earth, just under a light-year away from this star at that time, but no one bothered to measure their velocity vector. And no one noticed that they were Population Two stars, not in a planar orbit like most other stars here, but in a halo orbit. They were moving almost perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way’s disk. Toward this solar system.”

  A frown carved deep furrows on Bix’s forehead.

  “In fact, they were diving toward this system with a velocity of seven hundred and fifty kilometers per second, and the relative velocity was closer to one thousand kilometers per second. That’s fast enough to cover a light-year in three hundred years. While Aeon was on its journey from Earth, these stars moved through this system and caus
ed the moon to be kicked out of its orbit. That was less than fifty years ago. The binary dwarf is not far away. It is leaving very rapidly.”

  Catharin sat back, pressing her lips together. So. That was what Nature had thrown at them. That and the hot spot in Wedge T.

  For a long moment, there was a thick, brittle silence on the flight deck. Bix rubbed the frown furrows on his forehead as if physically erasing them. “Anything to report?” he asked Joel.

  “Main engine works fine. Feel it?” The ship shivered slightly, steadily. The engine had been designed to operate when the ship found dust and gas for fuel. Now, having come to a planetary system, it fed and burned vigorously, and would do so until Bix ordered engine shutdown. “The onesixth g of acceleration right now is the most we’ve had since we left our solar system.” Joel flopped into a seat at the command station, loose-limbed in the low g-force. “The flight deck WC works fine, too.”

  Seeing a good opening, Catharin spoke quickly. “Do you have anyone in Seventeen Wedge T?”

  “No, why?”

  “That was our hot spot. There are casualties.”

  “Whew! Just there?”

  “Yes.”

  “They didn’t feel anything, did they?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  Shaking his head, Joel turned his attention to the screen at his station. “Before I stepped out I was looking at the attitude thrusters, Bix. We may have a problem. Looks like their thrust has been more or less erratic over the years. The Zpos and Xpos arrays less erratic. Yneg more so. Nothing that the ship hasn’t been able to compensate for—so far.”

  All attention, Bix leaned over Joel’s shoulder. Joel pointed to information on the screen. “Look. About fifty years ago the ship shut down the most of the Yneg thrust array. Been making do without ever since.”

  “Don’t we need those thrusters before we brake?” Lary said edgily.

  “Need ‘em for everything,” Joel replied.

  “Just great!” Lary sounded upset. “What’ll go wrong next? At this rate—”