Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

“Hold it!” Joel protested. “You ready to tell me that the planet here is stable? Terraformable?”

  “I most certainly am. Settlements will be in domes for the indefinite future, but—”

  “Domes!” Joel sounded aghast.

  “Nguyen has more to say,” said Bix.

  “The Vandals are leaving. Their trajectory is away from this star.” The young astrophysicist fidgeted. “I haven’t found any other danger. The sun is stable and its output steady, for example. It may be too dangerous not to stay here.”

  So Nguyen had oscillated to the conservative position, joining Lary. Catharin guessed that, probably for the first time in his life, the universe had frightened Nguyen.

  “That your official recommendation?”

  Nguyen nodded.

  Joel protested, “We came to find a world with a moon—maybe even a world with green stuff and an atmosphere that we can breathe, dammit!”

  “I’m not sure we can,” Nguyen replied.

  “Did you unpack all of the options or did you just get scared?”

  Nguyen stiffened.

  In a selfrighteous tone, Lary told Joel, “You, my friend, ought to study the riskbenefit tables. You’ll see that—”

  “The tables made up three hundred years ago by fat old bureaucrats?” Cursing, Joel hit the table with the palm of his hand. “Has everyone forgotten why we came here?”

  Nguyen tried to protest, and Lary sputtered, “I resent—”

  Joel shouted them down. “For a green planet! How can we settle for one that’ll never be good and green?!”

  “And you’ll hold out for that even if it gets all of us and all ten thousand passengers killed!” Lary shrilled.

  Bix finally spoke. “Cool jets all around and that’s an order!” No one dared argue with him. “Cat?”

  He had given her a clear window in an atmosphere clouded with frustration, crackling with hostility. “My concern is the stasis, its consequences for us. And not incidentally what it does to our livestock. It would not be desirable to terraform a planet and have nothing but people with which to populate it.”

  “Get to your point,” Lary muttered.

  She ignored him. “As to animals, most can’t survive stasis this long. Fortunately, their embryos can. Clumps of cells, tissues, certain organs, and simple organisms are good for centuries. With higher creatures, it’s a function of life span. The longer the natural life span, the longer the duration of stasis before tissue deterioration sets in. When it does set in, things go downhill rapidly. Exponential decay.

  “Thaw it out—what used to be a creature—and it falls apart. Bones aren’t connected, even though the heart beats briefly. You have a pulsing bag of flesh. The maximum safe duration of stasis is a reality to be respected.”

  “Seems the big question is, what’s the limit given the human life span,” Bix said deliberately.

  She nodded. “Yes. We have a green parrot in the laboratory stasis vault and some porpoises in the main vaults downstairs. My readouts indicate that they’re all intact, alive, unlike the shorterlived species. The pattern is clear. Stasis can last as long as ten times a species’ maximum lifespan. Which means that human stasis is good for a millennium.”

  Joel grinned. “That’s a change of tune.”

  “Recommendation?” Bix asked.

  “I now believe that our course of action depends on the existence of another option. No, not option, I’d like to go on record saying that it depends on an alternative to remaining here.” She caught Joel’s eye. He nodded thanks. “If there’s a reasonable alternative, I recommend that we take it.”

  “What makes you so bold all of a sudden?” Lary asked.

  “Facts.”

  Lary threw up his hands. “Four days later we’ve still got a split right down the middle!”

  “Looks that way,” said Bix.

  “We ought to wake up more people,” said Lary. Startled, none of his listeners replied to that. They still had eight mission specialists as well as the rest of the primary and backup astronaut crew tucked away in the stasis vaults. “People who know what they’re talking about. Scientists!”

  Not, presumably, astronauts and doctors. Joel scowled. “There’s no point in adding legs to a committee.”

  “I’m referring to the addition of brains.”

  “You’re—We are forgetting something,” Catharin said, holding in her temper. “The Book says those awake vote. Period. The responsibility for this decision rests with us.”

  She refrained from pointing out that the mission specialists had been picked for their credentials, not their personalities. Lary was evidence enough of that. More scientific talent would not help. They needed leadership.

  With analytical clarity, yet feeling disloyal, Catharin wondered whether Bix could resolve this conference by saying the right thing. But Bix did not have Joel’s gift for words.

  Bix said, “The Book also says the Commander breaks a tied vote. But it’s still early for that. The key to the whole business is ‘reasonable alternative.’ Cat’s just given us all the time we need for any option in the Book. Joel and I’ve made certain that this ship can hold up through any of ‘em. We’ve got about one more day before the window for braking opens and we have to act one way or another. One more day to dig for that reasonable alternative.”

  Catharin glanced at Joel, who remained silent. Perhaps the Ramamirtham Maneuver did not qualify as reasonable.

  “We’ve done enough jawing,” Bix said. “Nguyen and Lary, I want you, with Joel, to run through our options. By tomorrow morning. The Book’s specified options.”

  Joel asked sharply, “You trust the options in the Book that much?”

  “As of yet, there’s no good reason not to go by the Book.”

  You mean no defensible reason, Catharin thought suddenly. No reason to give to the ten thousand colonists when we revive them, or to give to your conscience if more of them die.

  “The reason is the moon that wasn’t there,” Joel said in a harsh voice.

  “I have to go by the Book,” Bix said heavily. His shoulders drooped as if the lifelong military starch had worn out. “I have to assume that the Aeon Foundation knew what it was doing and that it sent us here with reliable instructions.”

  Joel turned away from the Captain.

  Late in the ship’s night, Bix decided to go on an inspection tour. To her surprise, he asked Catharin rather than Joel to come along. “I don’t need his expertise. I need yours.”

  The ‘vator took them a short way down the Axis and out toward the hull. They emerged at a tunneltrain station.

  Compared to any of the ‘vator’s other landings, the station seemed enormous. The ‘vator had been designed for the crew’s exclusive use. The train was mass transit. But the weightlessness, the dark, and the cold made the station as strange as though a dream had conjured it up, a cavern of the subconscious mind.

  Using the banister of a stairway to pull herself along, she followed Bix toward the platform. Bix parked himself on the platform’s guardrail and stared into the tunnel on his right.

  A breeze wafted out of the dark tube. Light gleamed on the tunnel’s curved walls. Headlight dazzling to the eye, serpentine bulk flowing from the tunnel, the train came on wings of wind like a dark angel of the psyche. Catharin’s heart pounded in ridiculous alarm. It’s just a vehicle, she told herself.

  The train slowed to a stop beside the platform, and all of its doors hissed open. Bix gestured toward the conductor’s cabin at the head of the train. They pulled themselves in.

  Doors closing, the train accelerated. The tracks ran on the outside of Outtown. Just the right size for two people, the little cabin had a large front windshield and a console from which the automatic route programming could be overridden. The cabin’s roof pointed toward the center of the ship. As soon as the train moved, a slight centrifugal force set in, sufficient to make sitting down feasible. Catharin felt herself pressed into the seat, featherlightly.

&nbs
p; Here the train ran below Outtown, close to the hull. After a mile or two the tunnel angled upward. The train emerged into Outtown in the North Industrial region. It climbed to an elevated way between deserted buildings.

  Bix took in the scene: factories, warehouses, a sewage treatment plant, revealed by sparse nightlights. “I forgot how big Outtown is. A damned city.”

  “It doesn’t look used enough to be a city,” Catharin replied.

  “Will be if we stay here.” He put his feet up on console, careful, in the slight g-force, not to dislodge himself from his seat in the process. “You wanna be my sounding board?”

  “That’s part of my job.”

  “My circuit boards all clear?”

  “Unqualified yes.”

  “Rest of us?”

  “Yes. Those of us who are exhibiting difficult personalities are normally that way.”

  Bix grunted unhappily.

  The tunneltrain ran south toward the residential zone of Aeon’s Outtown, where people would live while remaking a new planet. Catharin identified holes and bare architectural rims meant to be filled later with landscaping plants.

  “Are you physically well?” asked Catharin.

  “I don’t look off, do I?”

  “Remember how you got your nickname, ‘Old Ironsides’? You cracked two ribs and finished your mission without revealing the fact. That’s why I’m asking.”

  With a short laugh, he said, “I’m queasy around the edges. And I feel old. Little aches and pains. Maybe I’ve always had ‘em, but I never thought about it before.”

  In the distance, a building loomed above the rest, recognizable as the hospital. “There’s the Doc Shop, let’s hear what it has to say.” Bix hailed the hospital on the radio, and a string of information came back in response. The hospital stood ready to receive the thousands of people from the stasis vaults.

  At intervals they came to train stations. In the midst of the residential zone they reached the station called Celestis. Bix had the train stop there. The station lay in the bottom of a valley made of glass, thick and strong with arching braces, part of the inner hull itself. One day the ship’s outer hull and insulating layer would be used up in the making of a new world, and the station would lie in a trough full of stars. Now, insulation lay on the other side of the glass: doubly useful materials that were needed for the ship’s future life as a terraforming satellitecity and presently stowed between the inner and the outer hulls for the duration of the star flight, more protection from the elements of interstellar space.

  “This ship’s the real Old Ironsides,” said Bix. “Hide’s in fine shape. All three layers of it.”

  “Could it withstand the Ramamirtham Maneuver?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “So he brought that up with you, too, huh. Hell, yes. The double hull’s hard, fantastic engineering. Plus the star shield. Whatever hits that glances off and is deflected so it doesn’t collide with the rest of the body of the Ship. Plus the magnetosphere has a shielding effect where it comes to charged particles. Plus we’ve got the automatic guns to ionize rocks that are in our way. Aeon was designed for the Ram Maneuver.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  The train purred away from the glass valley Celestis. “Aeon was overdesigned deliberately, to make sure it was up to the rigors of the stars. And the Ram Maneuver was the benchmark, up to which the design criteria were elevated.” Bix looked her in the eye and asked abruptly, “Would you agree to it?”

  “The Ramamirtham Maneuver? Yes. I would.”

  “Got any justification in mind?”

  “One has occurred to me. I’m not an astronautical engineer—”

  “Good thing, too.”

  “Thanks, I think. At any rate, I’ve studied how the global cryostasis settled down and why. It’s a big system, the vaults, the medical machines, the cooling lines, the Intelligence. Factoring in the complexity of it, it’s a vast system.”

  “Damn complicated big,” he agreed.

  “It was modeled exhaustively. The model couldn’t possibly predict everything. Too many details had to be left out, too many small factors added up in unexpected ways. Synergies that no one could have anticipated cropped up.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Now that things have settled down, the stasis has a great deal of inertia, so to speak, and barring really strong disruptive forces it will stay as it is for hundreds of years.”

  “Luck?”

  “Yes, Bix. We were lucky. The stasis could have lost its balance at some point early on and run away. Since planets are even bigger systems, I should think similar principles apply.”

  He listened closely, content to hear her thoughts unfolded at her own rate.

  “We never modeled Earth’s weather or its ecology accurately enough to predict what civilization would do to the planet. Mars was being terraformed with uncertain results,” she said. “Terraforming was failing on Venus, theoretical models to the contrary. Planets—even ones that we have studied for centuries—are too big and too complex. If you try to change them, they may rock back to their original equilibrium. Or the change may run away from you.”

  “You’re right,” he replied. “Lary’s good at what he does, though. I’d trust his models of the new planet’s future before I’d trust what most planetologists said about its present.”

  “Still, planetary modeling is not a sure thing.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “The planet we have here is already teetering on the edge of even hypothetical habitability. For one thing, it has an elliptical orbit and wide climate swings, and for another, it has no moon. Its axis could wander and turn a pole toward the sun, putting the equator into the icebox while melting the polar ice. Terraforming might fail. Our descendants would live in domes forever.”

  He rubbed his chin. “That’s so bad? Folks on Luna do. Did at the time we left. Whatever.”

  “They had the Earth in their sky, always. I’m afraid that if we stay here, a day will come when people have forgotten green land and blue seas.”

  “It’s possible,” Bix admitted.

  “That is a risk too. Not a medical one but spiritual. I truly believe that it’s more grave than the risks of the Ramamirtham Maneuver.”

  He looked through the windshield into the distance. They had reached the equatorial region. Here farms and gardens would be planted in the future.

  “Bix? Would you do it?”

  “Would I take the stars by the tail to fly to a better world in the Sagittarius arm? You bet I would—if I weren’t in command.” He brooded now as he watched the terrain go by, blank square plots separated by wide bands meant to be future windrows of trees. Dotting the sterile plains were geodesic domes designed to serve as barns. “We got horses?”

  “Embryonic ones, yes, lots.”

  “I grew up on a farm,” he said. “In upstate New York. That was before your time, before the land there died. I am old. I’ll never see the green of a world that we terraform from rock-bottom scratch. I wanted that. I’m afraid it’s affecting my judgment.”

  “It could. You’re wise to realize that. Remember also that you might overcompensate.”

  “Am I overcompensating?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible, that’s all.”

  “Goddamn Eta Sagittarii C.” Hearing the bitter tone of his voice, Catharin’s heart sank. She feared that she knew what his decision would be. At the station on the equator, Bix stopped the tunneltrain and headed it back toward the north pole, the crew level, and the final day of star flight.

  5 Halo

  In the morning they assembled on the flight deck. “Eta Sagittarii is out,” Bix said bluntly. “Other options fall below the threshold of acceptability when updated astronomy is factored into the Book’s risk/benefit tables. In short, I don’t see a reasonable alternative. We stay.” He ordered braking. Made, the decision did nothing to ease the tension.

  Joel took his place at the Flight station. For once his face w
as impossible to read. He started the countdown.

  Catharin, at the Medical station, did not expect the impact of braking to disrupt the huge stasis system, though she would monitor it closely. She also watched the physiological states of the flight crew. Joel’s blood pressure read high, driven up by anger. From Bix came the signal of the signature heartbeat. Durable, dutiful Bix: had he gotten command of Aeon by virtue of sheer durability? A more charismatic commander, a man with a gift for words, might have turned the vote toward moving on. Catharin’s own distress level ran high. She disagreed with Bix’s decision. She felt as though a part of her were dying. She wondered what she would say to the people she brought out of stasis here, days and months and years from now.

  “Fifteen hundred A.C.,” Lary announced. He had won. To his credit, he refrained from gloating and instead modeled away at their future world more energetically than ever. “The greenery has stabilized and diversified into altiplano grasslands and snow forests.”

  “Everybody lives in greenhouses?” Joel asked, with acid around the edges of his voice.

  “That’s where the houses are, and people stay indoors in the extremes of winter. But they can go outside in summer. And the sky is blue over the glass,” Lary said defensively. Silent, Nguyen watched Lary. Neither specialist had an assigned role in the braking maneuver.

  Catharin thought about Joseph Devreze, revived from stasis ten years in the future, asked to genetically engineer better altiplano grass or perhaps algae. How would he fare, arrogant and restless spirit that he was? It would be his purgatory, if not his hell.

  Bix gave the order to turn on the thrusters. The stars in the flight deck window swayed. “Little rough,” Joel murmured, hovering over the thruster controls.

  “Definitely rough,” said the Captain. “Try to clear Z’s throat there.”

  “Z’s choked—it just shut down on us.”

  “Keep the others steady.”

  The burn lasted for several minutes, making the ship yaw, swinging the engine’s spike around to point in the direction of their forward motion. The quality of the yawing burn dissatisfied Bix. He held a muttered discussion with Joel about the problem.