Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  One star shone brighter than the rest, because now it was close enough to be a sun slightly more orange than Earth’s Sol. The Intelligence depicted concentric circles around it, representing a solar system. One of the circles, drawn in green, flashed. That meant terrestrial planet in the habitable zone: the aim and the end of the odyssey of Aeon.

  After the house call on Bix, Catharin returned to her medical laboratory. Miguel Torres-Mendoza arrived on schedule. Perched on the examining table, he dutifully rolled up his sleeve and extended his arm. He had a wide, sturdy hand and forearm, well-defined musculature on strong ulna and radius bones. “Make a fist,” she told him. As his blood spurted into her vial, the muscle groups in his arm stood out so clearly that she could have named them by sight. His whole body was like that arm: “stocky” did not do justice to his solid bone structure and well-defined musculature.

  Miguel scanned the furnishings of the infirmary. Fold-down cots, medic machines with arms neatly folded, floor-to-ceiling supply cabinets. Walls and equipment and cabinets were accented with the color gold. When Catharin was done, Miguel departed without small talk, disinclined to linger in the medical area with or without its attractive gold-color-coded edges.

  Catharin went to supper. She reached the dining hall as Joel and Becca were departing from it. Tall black man and small fair woman, the two seemed engrossed in a discussion. Becca was unself-consciously grubby. They had planned to inspect the engine today, and she, being very much the smaller of the two, had evidently been the one to visit the narrowest of the chases in the engine room. She animatedly described something mechanical to Joel, her hands making a sketch in the air. Catharin’s glance lingered on Joel as he laughed and replied. Even he, twice frozen and a decade older than Becca, looked vigorous. His dark skin seemed to have the undertone of health. His black hair was only lightly touched with frost at the temples.

  The dining hall was huge and shadowy except for a few lights illuminating the corner where the mess machines were. In a few more weeks, there would be more people revived—if all went by the Checklist—and the dining hall would fill up at mealtimes. At present, Catharin would have liked a smaller, cozier place to eat. She would have also liked better food. For the first time since coming out of stasis, Catharin cared what kind of food ended up in front of her. It was long-frozen, reconstituted, basic rations. People in the Space Force hadn’t called the feeding equipment “mess machines” for nothing, she thought in disgust, spooning up so-called beef stew that had the consistency of oatmeal. Lary knew how to coax good-tasting food out of the mess machines. Catharin wished he felt well enough, secure enough, or whatever it took, to put him in the mood for preparing baked goods. She would have liked chocolate cake. Catharin left the dining hall full but dissatisfied.

  Under her feet the mauve (for Food/Housing) striping on the floor turned into Medical gold. Weary, she returned to her laboratory with reluctance. It was Checklist, day ten. They had kept up with the Checklist only by dint of working ungodly long days. Neither she nor the others could keep up that pace until planetfall, some ninety days from now.

  Catharin pressed on. She had enough data points, medical samples from different people over a span of days, for the Ship’s Intelligence to model the medical situation and its possible outcomes. The Intelligence had a template for the model. But the template wasn’t good enough for her needs, so Catharin tailored it. She made mistakes in her haze of pained tiredness, biting her lip in frustration as she fixed them.

  She broke off to visit the lab’s restroom. Lacking the color-coded gold edges, it looked like an ordinary restroom in any hospital.

  Suddenly Catharin realized why the relativistic image on Bix’s workstation had looked so familiar to her as well. She shared a stricken look with herself in the little room’s mirror.

  It was the iconography of near-death experience. Patients who nearly died in the hospital sometimes reported having been suspended in a black or blank void, having seen a tunnel of light. She had always been skeptical about such accounts. And yet for Aeon it was utterly true. All of the starship’s living survivors, the revived as much as those still in stasis, had been near death, skirting death’s brink for a long, long time.

  A light, inquiring knock sounded on the laboratory door. Catharin checked the chronometer, which read nearly midnight, before she looked around to see Becca letting herself in. “You ought to be in bed. Do you feel well?”

  Becca noticed the medical model displayed by the medical Intelligence. The central image was a human body, crammed with colored icon codes. Parts of the screen showed graphs, charts, and, in one window, the atom-studded twists of a big molecule. “What’s that?”

  “Hemoglobin.”

  Becca said, “You’ve been watching us to see how we’re doing, but I’m pretty good at not letting feeling sick slow me down. Just in case you didn’t notice—I still don’t feel so great. Not quite myself.”

  “What are the symptoms?” Catharin asked quickly.

  Becca shrugged. “Nothing to put a name to. Vague aches, malaise or whatnot, changes from day to day. If you put a medical textbook in front of me I could convince myself that I had anything in there.”

  “Vague malaise isn’t abnormal, this soon after the stasis we’ve been through,” Catharin said. “Tell me if you start feeling worse, but probably you’ll gradually feel better.”

  “Yeah, like you said on my first day, I am young and female. Where does that leave old guys like Bixby?” Becca asked.

  Catharin glanced toward the hemoglobin. The molecule was deformed. Becca did not have enough knowledge of molecular biology to read the evidence of damaged DNA in a stem cell in bone marrow from its result—that mutated and poorly functioning hemoglobin. “Just feeling better more slowly than he’d like.” Catharin changed the subject. “How’s Engineering?”

  “Busy! Joel and I checked out the main engine. Then after supper we finished the activation list for the inspection robots.”

  “I’d like to know more.” She offered Becca a chair, and water in lieu of a more interesting beverage. Becca accepted both. It was late. Catharin should have been asleep, or attempting to be. But Catharin needed this—the chance to talk to Becca at the end of a long day, like so many late nights during training.

  Becca said, “We’ve got flying eyes and the walking robots that we call spiders. They have sticky feet for where there’s no atmosphere—meaning, the appendages extrude a quasi-adhesive that works in hard vacuum. So they can traipse around on the hull of the Ship.” Her hand scurried across the arm of the chair, demonstrating. “I tell you, Cat, the darn activation list for those spiders nearly drove me bonkers. I kept wishing we could just wind ‘em up and let em go.”

  Catharin smiled, imagining Becca sitting on a floor, like a kid under a Christmas tree, surrounded by toys, winding them up and releasing them one by one to prance around her.

  “But we’ve got to be sure everything works. In theory the Ship can check itself, but if there’s something wrong with its brain, so much for that. So we’ve got all these cross checks, not to mention site checks to make sure the remote reports match what the instruments on location say. And act lists by the bucketsful. I wonder if we could abbreviate the planetfall Checklist.”

  Catharin could have called it up on her workstation here in the laboratory, the Checklist in its nominal representation, the branching-tree diagram. She wondered what medical checks and sublists she could dare omit. None.

  “Heard the latest about Planet Green? Lary thinks we can plant grass, crops, and trees right away.”

  That set off a cascade of associations in Catharin’s mind. Tears started in her eyes. “I’ve wondered what Planet Green will be like. That the day is so long made me fear that there might be nothing but plankton and lichen, or that our seeds would never grow. . . . Did you bring your flute?”

  “Have flute, will travel. I played it a few times the past week. And I was incredibly rusty.” Becca made an exasperated fac
e. “It seems like only days ago that I went into stasis, but my body doesn’t see it that way. At least not for playing music.”

  Catharin filed the data point away in her professional mind. And closed that file for the time being. She asked, “Do you know ‘Simple Gifts’?”

  “Sure, the old Quaker hymn. I’ll play it for you if you’re forgiving. Not tonight, though. It’s too late to root around in the storage drawer in my cubicle. Every time I open the drawer door, it’s audible to Lary on the other side of the wall, so he tells me in no uncertain terms.”

  “I like the tune because Aaron Copland used it in Appalachian Spring,” Catharin explained. “The whole symphony is about a new life in a new world.”

  “Spring is right,” said Becca. “The green color on Planet Green covers a significant portion of the dry land, according to Lary. I pestered him to tell me more about it. I don’t think Lary likes me, or likes me being the chief engineer, or something.” Becca made a face. “And the feeling is getting to where it’s mutual, but anyway, he dropped a hint that it’s the kind of green that looks in infrared a whole lot like leafy plants, chlorophyll and all. He thinks it may compare to the Devonian period in Earth’s prehistory. Plants on the land, but no animals yet, except maybe some primitive insects and a few fish crawling on the shores of the seas. Anyway, an atmosphere and all such that our plants will do fine—and, wherever we put them, easily outcompete the natives, because ours are more highly evolved. So, in just a few years,” concluded Becca, as optimistic as ever, “we’ll be growing corn and daffodils, and grazing sheep down there in pastures! How’d our livestock fare?”

  “Those who were frozen as individuals perished,” Catharin said bluntly. “Their life spans are too short. But they were experimental subjects anyway. On the other hand, the colony material, the eggs and sperm cells in stasis, fared well. After planetfall, I’m going to fertilize some eggs in vitro and implant the results in the artificial gestation chambers. Want a pet?”

  “Pet?”

  “If the embryos are viable and turn into baby animals, someone other than me will have to take care of most of them. I hope to get a kitten and a puppy, a chick, and a miniature pig—a potbellied piglet.” Catharin was surprised to discover a sense of relaxation in herself. She felt tired, but not racked with tension. Crossing her legs, she twined them, tucked one foot behind the other ankle, and sipped flat, pure water from her glass, wishing it could have been white wine. “I want the kitten.”

  Becca relaxed too, draped over the chair in what would have been an untidy sprawl had she been a gangly male. Being neither gangly nor male, on her it looked winsome. She said brightly, “How about a horse?”

  “I could produce one. But on a starship, the upkeep might be rather awkward.”

  “So when are you gonna defrost some good-looking guys?”

  Catharin raised her eyebrows. “Did anyone ever tell you that you come up with unusual psychological associations?”

  With a self-conscious air, Becca replied, “Yeah, well, my sex drive seems to have thawed out. I didn’t notice it wasn’t there until it was.”

  “That sounds normal. The same thing happens with appetite for food.” Catharin frowned. “I noticed my lack of interest in meals. But, since you mention it, I haven’t felt any sexual interest since stasis.”

  “It’ll show back up when it’s ready to,” Becca assured her.

  “How about Miguel Torres?”

  Becca shook her head. “Mike’s as square as a building brick. No small talk. And no more large talk than necessary.”

  Becca was right. Torres was like that, now. Before the star flight, he had been a quiet but pleasant man. Not fixedly serious and silent, like now. Catharin wondered whether stasis could change personality traits permanently. She did not want to think about that. She said, “Well, the two of you might average out to a normal amount of conversation.”

  Becca responded with a good-natured laugh that shifted into a yawn.

  Catharin said, “It’s late, and you need your rest to activate your robots. Go.”

  “You need sleep too,” Becca commented as she departed. “Physician, heed thyself!”

  Hurled out and away by the spin of the Ship, the flying eye ascended along the Ship’s equator. Blasts of nitrogen released through tiny directional nozzles countered its radial velocity until its motion followed the curve of the starship, but more slowly than the Ship’s turning.

  A periscope housing ponderously came by. The flying eye traded a solemn gaze with the monocle of the periscope before it resumed collecting data, scanning with its camera. Craters pocked the arc of the Ship’s horizon, a bright imperfect curve against the star field.

  Advancing, the horizon revealed an even more irregular terrain. Rumpled folds like a miniature mountain range stood on the Ship’s horizon. The camera locked onto this irregularity.

  Because the Ship was spinning under it, the mountains marched toward the flying eye. It circled the seeming mountains and the fringe of foothills—pressure ridges radiating out across the skin of the starship. The illuminated contours were bright in the sun’s glare, the shadowed folds deep black.

  Under the crown of the mountains lay a semicircular ravine. It was a gash in the starship’s outer hull. The flying eye came in low over the area. The severe contrast between light and shadow made the inner depths of the damage impossible to discern. The eye dove toward the black valley, pulled up again—but not before it jettisoned an object smaller than itself. Carried by the momentum of the eye’s dive, the object tumbled once on its way into the ravine. It extended six pairs of jointed legs, alighted on the wall of the ravine, and stuck.

  The robotic spider called Tango 21 briefly conferred with the flying eye—an automatic check sequence. Function thus proved nominal, the spider began to climb the disrupted hull material. One delicate, lightly adhesive footfall after the next, the spider proceeded into the deeply ripped hull, going upward against centrifugal force.

  The flying eye hovered above and behind the spider. It let out flash bursts of light that enabled Tango 21 to gather optical data. The spider’s antenna transmitted a video stream back to the flying eye, which relayed it to the control center of Aeon.

  The spider’s forefeet went over an edge, where the disrupted ceramic stuff had fractured. Tango 21 tipped its body over the edge of the fracture to continue its trek.

  The contours of the fracture interrupted its link with the flying eye. It halted. It retraced its steps until the telemetry was restored. The spider angled a different course, its antenna pointing out behind it like a bristle.

  The little robot switched from optical to infrared observation, and what it saw, it transmitted, a ghostly picture from inside the gouged hull of Aeon. What had been a featureless dark recess optically was a terrain in infrared: irregular and jumbled as a canyon land, deeply fractured. And in infrared, the deepest part glowed, warm relative to the extreme cold of space.

  Tango 21 trekked up to the root of the gouge in Aeon’s hull. There, it confirmed the infrared reading. Its thermal sensors picked up heat. The bright roof of the damaged area was a pool of heat leaking out of the starship.

  Instructed to explore, the spider unfurled sensor arrays like long feelers. Mechanically shuffling its jointed legs, it moved sideways, brushing the bottom of the gouge with its sensor-feelers. The spider was making contact with the naked pressure hull of the starship.

  The spider registered a change in its surroundings and froze in its adhesive tracks. The damaged material around it shifted, closing down on the spider. Before its distress signal could bring a command back from the control center, telling it what to do, the spider was trapped between the ruptured insulation and the pressure hull. It reeled its feelers back into the protection of its carapace just before it found itself flattened to the maximum flexion its jointed legs could withstand.

  Viewscreens dominated the walls of the conference room. Each screen featured an image of the damage to the hull—ou
tside, inside, infrared, and the global view—the damage overlaid on a skeletal white diagram of the Ship’s interior structure. Color rendering of the infrared picture—a telltale blob of orange—told of the heat leak through the exposed part of the pressure hull. There was a pinpoint of purple too: the location of the trapped robot.

  Bix, Becca, Catharin, Joel, Miguel, and Lary sat around the conference room table, absorbing the imagery and its implications. Catharin noticed how discouraged the men looked—slumped shoulders, heads propped on hands. But Becca sat up straight, braced with determination.

  Joel said, “Toldja it’s too complicated of a critter to be reliable.”

  “No,” Becca answered quickly. “The gouge goes so far into the ceramic insulating layer of the hull that it’s like a flap, and the flap oscillates. You see, the ceramic is a rigid material, but not one homogenous piece. The oscillation is happening along one or more of the seams. It’s slow and slight, but enough to get my spider wedged in! That was at 0943 this morning. I sent commands for creative little calisthenics, but it couldn’t extricate itself. So now it’s in lockdown mode.” Her Goodie Book lay open in front of her, fatter than ever and dog-eared around the edges. She added, “Sorry, Captain.”

  “Don’t be. Letting a spider hitchhike in on the flying eye was a damn good idea. Now we know the worst.”

  “What happened to the Ship?” Miguel asked.

  Becca answered. “An impact that the star shield deflected almost successfully. It was a small, hard object, maybe a nickel-iron meteoroid. The object grazed the star shield, then bounced off the hull at the equator at a very shallow angle—I mean, as much of it as didn’t vaporize bounced off. The ceramic was shocked by impact and heat. Probably the properties of the ceramic are locally changed for the worse. Anyway, the encounter gouged us all the way down to the surface that the spider found just before it got wedged in. And that’s the real hull, as in, the last thing between us and space. We’ve got to find out if it’s damaged. We’ve also got to mend the insulation.”