by C. Gockel
“Outstanding. They even got the spider back.” The shuttle’s passengers had mobilized into a melee of talk and handshaking. Becca was lavishing congratulations on the repair crew, especially Zak, who basked.
“So you think it’s important to study Blue,” said Lary.
Calm and thoughtful, Miguel answered, “Blue stabilizes the axial tilt of Green, allowing life to evolve in peace without drastic climatic disruptions. Blue must also produce huge tides which propel life to evolve more rapidly than it would with only low sun tides.” Lary nodded emphatic agreement. Miguel concluded, “Life as it is evolving on Green will concern us very much. So we should study Blue to understand why Green is green.”
“The Ship has instrument packages designed to be dropped down into a planet’s atmosphere,” Lary said. “But Bixby insists that they’re all dedicated to Green.”
“Bix is operating by the Book, and any way you read the Book, we are in a critical situation, with no resources to spare for pure science,” Catharin replied, careful to sound neutral—not defensive of Bix.
“One package would tell me a lot. Just one!” He sounded frustrated.
On the Big Picture, the hurricane-laced moon rose again over the horizon of Aeon, dramatically beautiful and alien. For the first time, it occurred to Catharin that this blue apparition would be the night sky’s moon for colonists on Green. She found the idea startling and disquieting. Earth’s moon, Luna, had affected evolution and human culture. This moon had a different character and much greater size. Lary might be right. Catharin said, “I can justify an investigation into the blue moon.”
“Do what? You?” He sounded incredulous.
“On Earth, there were subtle but real medical, and psychological, concerns about the moon. Blue is bigger, brighter, and altogether unknown. Yes. In my official capacity, I can name concerns and I can justify some research. I don’t think I can argue for a major research project, with lots of personnel and material, though.” She raised her eyebrows at Lary. Well?
Then Lary proved to Catharin’s satisfaction that he was basically a reasonable man. “Why, get me an instrument package or two, and I’ll get you results!” He added, “Planetary science has a long tradition of operating on a shoestring.” She could see the analytic gears meshing in his mind already.
The patient’s heart stopped.
Rare side effects of revival from stasis include cardiac arrest. Inject one milligram of atropine. Start CPR. Watch for signs the drug is acting. The room was strangely vague. It must have been the stasis recovery room. That didn’t matter. The mental voice—as always, a calm contralto, her own—tightly focused her attention. Using the heels of both hands, stacked, Catharin repeatedly compressed the dark-haired man’s sternum with almost mechanical regularity.
The atropine perfused through the patient’s bloodstream. Soon it must restore the stasis-deadened cardiac nerve pathways. But something else was wrong. This man’s rib cage did not have normal elasticity; his chest resisted compression. Catharin pushed harder.
A gray pallor of the skin spread from the artery where she had injected the atropine. Dulling and stiffening the living flesh, it invaded his neck, his torso. With horror, she realized that the atropine was having the wrong effect. Instead of regulating the nerves, the atropine was changing the man’s flesh into old, dried wood.
The ribs under her hand shattered. The thin shroud of skin shredded. Her hands plunged into a ruined chest cavity and a nest of hissing snakes.
Catharin woke with a jerk that nearly sent her off her bed.
Her heart pounded. The room’s darkness seemed thick with dread. Overcoming the dream’s residue of paralysis, she reached out, swatted the bedside lamp to make it turn on, then collapsed back onto the bedclothes. Yellow light flooded her cubicle. All bare walls and no furniture except the bed and built-in desk, the lighted room was almost worse than the dark.
Catharin shivered. Post-stasis nightmares? Not a problem she’d had yet, herself, though others had reported such to her. She reviewed the bad dream, every offensive detail of it, as though examining a wound. Losing anyone is the physician’s nightmare; here and now, losing that man would be catastrophic. For the stuff of nightmare, her dreaming mind could not have done better.
So. It had been a real nightmare, nothing worse. Unfortunately, after that blast of adrenaline in her system, she would not sleep soundly again. She checked the clock and groaned aloud at the reading of three a.m.
She tossed. The barren cubicle was no comfort to her. She had not had time to personalize her private quarters. After planetfall she needed to do something about this. Such as, ask Miguel for a plant. Leaving the light on, Catharin drifted into a restless semiwakeful haze.
Wait.
Catharin’s eyes snapped open, focused on the off-white ceiling above her. Her mind raced. No medicine would turn a man into dead wood. But it was altogether possible that someone—or everyone—might react differently to medicine now. The changes that stasis had wrought at the molecular level were so systemic and multifarious that the entire medical baseline might have changed.
Catharin rolled over abruptly, throwing herself and her bedclothes into a tangle. So. This was what her unconscious had been trying to warn her about: that even the most ancient and routine drugs—atropine, epinephrine, even penicillin—could have the wrong effects now, could kill someone.
She could not stand this barren little cubicle any longer. She got up and went for a walk, alone with her dreadful new knowledge.
This early in the Ship’s morning, nobody else was up and about, and it felt as it had weeks before—vast, empty, still. Not altogether quiet. The blowers of the air-conditioning system whirred. Water murmured in the wall, hinting at the presence of a plumbing line.
Catharin wondered why she had not noticed those sounds weeks ago. Perhaps some kinds of peripheral attentiveness came back late after revival from stasis. Conceivably, the nightmare’s adrenaline overload had cleared the last residue of stasis out of some of her sensory pathways. Catharin followed the murmuring pipe behind the corridor wall. The trace of sound led her out of the mauve-striped Food/Housing part of Level Seven. The stripe on the floor changed to green, for Life Support Operations.
She detected a distinctive smell, sweet-sour and complicated—Miguel’s yeast vats. A tandem lure, the sound of the pipe and the prickly aroma in the air led Catharin toward the work control center in Life Support Ops. At a workstation, Miguel brooded over a display of bar graphs with the slouch of someone who had not slept.
He had thick, powerful shoulders, matching the rest of his build. As a physician, Catharin admired his body. As a woman, she was attracted to men of a different type: slimmer than Miguel, and taller, and more high-strung. Not for the first time, Catharin wondered why sexual attraction could hold out for an ideal even when reality offered a man with a good physique and good character. She said, “Is the God of Water’s Course brooding over his work?”
His brown eyes flicked her way, but Miguel only answered after a long intake of breath, translating English sentences out of a continuum of Spanish thinking. “An evil spirit has appeared in the new, small world.”
Catharin was baffled. “Say again?”
“I am establishing yeast cultures in these vats, to be a substrate for manufactured food. There are problems with these yeasts. Some strains are dead, killed by the long stasis. Others have mutated. I get strange results, as well as unusual odors and other biochemical products.”
“Make sure we don’t get poisoned by our food!”
“I will. But these mutations worry me.”
Catharin was not surprised. Her medical models had already told her what to expect, and not just in yeasts. She pulled out for herself another chair like his, stowed in the wall, attached with a swivel joint.
“Catharin, if these yeasts have mutated, what about all of the other useful microbes that we have brought? What about our plant seeds and animal germ cells . . . and what about us
?”
“The microbes are more mutable than higher life-forms.”
He gave her a dark look. Behind him was a wall full of glass boxes in which plant seedlings—the first plants for the Ship—had sprouted out of synthetic dirt under yellow lights, like frayed green threads. He gestured at them. “And some seeds are not germinating, while some seem to develop abnormally.”
Instead of shallow reassurance, Catharin decided to share with him her best hope, so emotionally loaded that it could manifest itself in a nightmare. “Miguel, have you heard of Joseph Devreze, the theoretical molecular biologist?”
“I learned of his work in my postdoctoral studies at Cornell,” Miguel answered immediately: the information was filed in his brain in English, not in Spanish. “He was a genius who did brilliant manipulation of genes to make new kinds of organisms. Why?”
“We’ve got him.”
Miguel’s black eyebrows shot up, an index of his astonishment.
“He joined us just before we left. Needless to say, we weren’t about to turn down a passenger with his kind of credentials.”
Miguel nodded vigorously.
Catharin sighed. “Unfortunately, I was not impressed with his commitment to human well-being.”
Miguel’s expression darkened. “A bad man?”
“Well, no. I don’t think his motives are evil. But I don’t think his motives are good either. He invented dogs who could breathe underwater—”
“The sea dogs. They were useful creatures.”
“Some of his creations were just fashionable pets.” Catharin did not manage to conceal her disgust. He played games with genes to make fantastic creatures.”
To Catharin’s consternation, Miguel laughed like a carefree man. “Oh, but we need him. Most certainly, we need him. You see, the gods who are creator and creatrix, especially of small worlds, always take themselves too seriously, and they want their work to be perfect. But evil spirits appear and start spoiling things, and the gods would give up and throw the world away and start over, if they could. Fortunately, in almost every creation myth, soon there also comes the trickster god. His name is Coyote, or Pan, or Raven. He does absurd and mischievous things that annoy the creator gods. He saves the world, too.”
The huge main engine burned. Aeon changed its course to loop around the two worlds, third partner in a three-body dance that slowed the Ship down: Ram Maneuver in reverse. Each loop was studded with braking simulations and with real, minor burns and position adjustments, and Checklist tests and clears like innumerable beads on a string. Early in the third loop, on the Blue end, that world dominated the Big Picture, centered in a rectangle of black space, like an azure sign on a sable heraldic flag.
Lary happily occupied himself with telemetry from an instrument package that had been dropped into Blue’s maelstrom of winds. During one of the long waits between one burn and the next, he announced, “I think Blue’s new.”
“How so?” asked Joel whose work, at the moment, consisted of waiting.
“Ejected from some other solar system and to arrive here long after Green already existed.”
“Not new-made, new arrival?”
“Right! One piece of evidence is that Blue and Green orbit around each other in a plane tilted with respect to the solar system’s ecliptic plane. Looks to me like Blue dropped in and was persuaded—by the gravitational influence of the sun here, and of Green—to stay. Mind you, I doubt that Green was green at the time. It may have been in a Cambrian stasis of sorts—life permeating the sea, but, in the absence of any but sun tides, not successfully encroaching on the land. Blue, arriving on the scene, would have created new high tides and stabilized the axis tilt of Green. Which would have started an evolutionary acceleration on Green.”
“We should thank Blue for the other one being Green?” asked Joel.
“I believe so.”
Sitting next to Catharin, Miguel looked thoughtful. She wondered if he was making up a myth.
“Your instrument package got ripped to shreds before it reached sea level,” said Becca. Evidently tired of sitting, she was standing, elbows propped on the top of Engineering station.
“I can’t help that! It’s what happens to instrument bundles dropped into strange worlds with bad weather!”
“It happens to dumb bundles. I think you ought to try a smart one.”
“There won’t be a drone allotted to the study of Blue,” Lary replied, testy. “I’m told that they’re to be used exclusively for Green.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Becca. “We could fab a special exploration drone out of spare and out-of-spec parts in Transport, like a hobby. How about if we plan to come back someday after planetfall and send that custom-made hobby drone down through the eye of a hurricane? I’ll fly it for you.”
Lary looked surprised and interested. “That would be a way to collect data that I can’t get otherwise.”
“Deal!” said Becca.
Miguel listened intently. It was work for him to identify the emotional nuances in an English conversation. He digested the exchange that had just unfolded. Finally, he said softly to Catharin, “What you started, letting Lary start investigating Blue, was well done, Doctor. For one thing, he is in a much better mood.”
She answered, “Everybody needs to be understood. And that reminds me, I have a new laboratory technician. She hasn’t been revived very long, but she’s very bright and expert. She’s Spanish-speaking Filipino. I have the impression that she would feel more comfortable—more at home—in Spanish than in English.” And so are you. “Would you mind meeting her, when you have a chance, and talking to her a bit? I think that would ease her adjustment to the situation here. Her name is Evangelina.”
Chivalrous as always, Miguel said, “Of course.”
Catharin did not add that Evangelina was quite attractive, in a delicate, golden, Eurasian way. Miguel would discover that on his own.
Planet Blue dwindled in the Big Picture for the last time. The starship fell past the point where Blue and Green were equidistant. And that marked the start of the countdown for final burn and orbital insertion. Aeon approached Planet Green for the third, the nearest and final time, preparing to brake, the final challenge for the ancient ship.
The green planet dominated the Big Picture. Verdant, temperate-zone landmasses flanked an equator girdled by ocean. Vegetation reached deep into the river-cloven hearts of the continents and high up into the polar latitudes. The wide, warm, equatorial sea reflected the world’s sun in a disk of shimmer.
Miguel, normally unflappable, excitedly called out to Lary, at Astro/Survey, “See how green it is!”
Lary bobbed his head. “Gorgeous!” he agreed.
Letters on the Big Picture read terraforming time. There were fields for millennia, centuries, and years. And the fields were filled with zeroes. This world was terrestrial already.
One by one the last few twigs of the Checklist tree turned green. Joel, Becca, and Bix called out subsystem checks and clears. The Ship’s anatomy was like medical jargon, though the words for its parts and functions were not Greek and Latin, were more clipped, more irreverent and Anglo-Saxon, and considerably more arbitrary than medical terms. Catharin’s thoughts skittered on the slick ice of her tension.
Becca called out, “Last check: sequence.”
Catharin felt a mounting excitement, almost a physical throb, but it was outside of her too, an electric expectancy in the control center. A rapt silence filled the gallery, overflowing with onlookers—Becca’s hull repair crew, Joel’s thruster mechanics, Catharin’s nurses and lab technicians, and Miguel’s plumbers.
Suddenly Catharin understood the Checklist. It was like the medical rote in her own head when she had a patient in critical condition. It made detachment conceivable. Except this one hadn’t lasted for only the critical seconds of a medical emergency or the hours of a surgery. For one hundred days, it had kept them from reacting to the ultimacy of this moment, from being swept away by despair or
excitement.
“It’s clear!” Becca called out. With that, the one remaining tip of the tree greened. The audience broke into jubilant applause, which even Lary, at Astro/Survey, joined. Excitement surged—as irresistible as a river’s current.
Bix kept his footing in the surge of excitement. “Go for planetfall. Six minutes, twenty-two seconds until attitude adjustment.”
Catharin anchored herself on Miguel’s methodical calm. He pulled up a life support systems schematic on his half of the screen. She followed suit with a parallel schematic of the stasis lines. Neither system should prove oversensitive to a braking burn—not unless a bit of pipe lining was ready to tumble and clog a line, or a weakened line ready to break.
“Approaching perigee.”
The Big Picture showed the dark side of the green new world. Like Earth from orbit, it gleamed faintly. But unlike Earth, there were no striations of yellow power grid. Lightning flickered on the fringe of one nameless continent, the sole illumination across the whole dark extent of it. Catharin’s throat constricted. After a lifetime of hopes and fears, five years of training on Earth, a journey an eon long; after one hundred days of Checklist and simulations here, this was not at all what they’d expected, but was altogether real. Catharin could hardly breathe.
“Structural readiness?” Bix demanded.
“Ninety-nine percent nominal, one percent—that’s the damaged part—tolerable. Ready.” Becca’s voice squeaked with excitement.
“Burn readiness?”
“Nominal. Two minutes, twenty-three seconds to the braking burn,” said Joel, his voice rough with feeling. The excitement ran swifter and more turbulent than ever, like a river about to turn into a cataract.
“Stations—stay on your duty,” Bix ordered. No wonder Hubert Bixby was the Captain. Space veteran, grizzled, imperturbable, Bix of the signature rock-steady heartbeat, only he could have kept his emotional footing in the flood. “Attitude adjustment, go ahead.”
Easier said than done: spinning like a gyroscope the size of a small mountain, the massive starship wanted to stay pointed the same way.