Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  The other man nodded. “You renamed, then. Lacking a home city that meant the world to me, I did not. My name is Carlton Wing. Sixth Tier.”

  The Sixth Tier was supposed to stay in stasis for a century longer than First. “Sixth?” Joe asked sharply. He felt confused. He hated feeling confused.

  Wing pointed over Joe’s shoulder to a wall that was a visual screen. A new world slipped across the wall: a cloudglazed, blue world with green-blotched tan continents. “I’m a field botanist. They revived me before my time because of all the plants down there.”

  Catharin returned with a glass of pinkish water for Joe. “That planet’s too green to be new,” he told her. Then he noticed that he was the center of attention in the room. People weren’t crowding around him, but every one of them was watching him.

  Before cold zero, he’d been the center of attention many times and in many places. It had felt good. It didn’t feel good now. He was confused.

  “It was green when we arrived here,” said Catharin. “That’s why we had to revive you, and others.” Voices elsewhere in the rooms said, “It’s a complex ecosystem.” “—jungles—” “—megafauna!?” Catharin waved everyone else to be quiet and continued, “We soon realized just how lucky we are to have one of Earth’s most distinguished biologists on the Ship.”

  Joe heard a murmur of assent, someone whispering about the Nobel Prize. Carlton Wing’s eyebrows arched. “Now I recognize you.”

  “We revived you out of sequence,” Catharin repeated. “We need your expertise as we evaluate the biological hazards involved in colonizing that planet.”

  Joe nodded before she finished speaking. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said. “To do what’s needed to colonize the destination.”

  Wing said softly, “This isn’t the destination.”

  “Huh?”

  Catharin grimaced “We don’t know all that went wrong. The Ship traveled to the destination star, and the stasis machines revived the astronaut crew—myself, Captain Bixby, and Commander Atlanta—as scheduled. The planet was there. But its moon was not. We reprogrammed the ship, changed course, and put ourselves back into stasis. And the ship went on and on until it came here.” Before he could ask questions, she pushed the glass in his hands up to his lips. “Now drink.”

  Commander Atlanta—the ship’s pilot, a tall black man whom Joe recognized from newscasts on Earth—was leaning against a table behind the doctor. If he was going by Atlanta now, he’d renamed. The important point was that he was the starship’s secondincommand. He told Joe, “We directed the ship to search for a world with some green on it. Primitive plant life like the Cambrian time on earth, with plankton in the seas and oxygen in the atmosphere, was what we asked for.” He glanced at the world now spinning out of sight on the wall-screen and shook his head amazedly. “The ship overdid it.”

  Joe struggled to drink the pink, bitter medicine. The other people watched him. In the corner of the room, incongruous by its presence, a green parrot shifted its feet on a makeshift perch. Sulky and ruffled, the parrot watched Joe with one beady eye.

  “He’ll be all right,” said Catharin.

  “So will we,” said Atlanta, with an authoritative ring to his voice. “This ship could have terraformed a desolate planet, to make it habitable. If we have to we can remake this one. Even sterilize parts of it, if the ecology’s not good for us.”

  “Surely that won’t be necessary!” Wing exclaimed. “What about our other options here?”

  “Options?” Joe asked.

  “Watch the picture,” said Catharin. To Joe’s astonishment, another planet rolled into sight. This one had a sea as wide as the globe, under swirling clouds. “Somebody turn off the lights.” The artificial lighting flicked out. In its place, an eerie blue radiance flooded the room. “Seamoonlight,” said Catharin.

  “It’s pretty,” said a reedy male voice, “but those clouds are hurricanes.”

  “But there’s a third planet in this solar system’s habitable zone,” said Wing. “There, the redbrown star . . . this system’s Mars, more or less.”

  “More sizable than Mars back home,” Commander Atlanta said. “No moon.”

  “How far along is the exploration of the green one?” Joe asked, and was informed that an isolated, equatorial mountain had been selected for the first base camp downside. The peak had been flattened and sterilized with a single clean fusion bomb. The first landing by a manned shuttle had already been made there. The base camp would soon be set up. . . .

  Joe stopped listening, distracted by a distressing sensation that the pink medicine was burning out the cotton in his insides. No one bothered to turn the lights back on. In the huge picture, the stars wheeled by. Never in his life had Joe seen stars like that: shining shoals of them, laced with dark ropes of dust. Joe asked, “Catharin, what did you mean ‘on and on’?”

  Silence fell.

  “What year is it?”

  Atlanta said, “By the ship-clock, it’s the year 3210.”

  Joe nearly fainted. He remembered the projected time limit for stasis, how fantastically overlong it had sounded, how absurdly millennial: one thousand years. But the flight had taken one hundred and seventeen years more than a millennium. They had gone a solid ten percent over the purported safe limit. By now, the cells in his body must have sustained irreversible damage. The molecules were hurt. With physiological consequences that might prove unpleasant. Or fatal.

  Joe felt sick.

  The Ship shrank as Joe watched it through a viewport beside his seat on the shuttleplane. More and more of the Ship came into view. The few lights near the Ship’s north pole represented the habitat of more than one thousand awakened people. Mostly dark and dormant, the Ship was an enormous Earth egg.

  A month of labor lay between his wakeup day and the present moment. Never in his life on Earth had Joe struggled against a chronically unhealthy body. But the damned stasis fever refused to go away. His month’s work now seemed as desperate and brief as a night full of bad dreams. He was on his way at last: one brief descent and he would arrive at Unity Base and the cusp of the future. Settling back into his seat, he glanced at his sole fellow passenger.

  “Good to see you again, Dr. Toronto,” said Wing. “Your health returned?”

  “Not completely, but I need to be at the base.”

  Wing continued, “I suppose that your research can’t wait any longer, stasis fever or none.”

  It was Joe who couldn’t wait. Once he had been fully revived from stasis, it had begun to sink in for him how much he’d lost: Earth with its great cities, civilization with all its energy and intricacy, the World Net with its power and subtlety . . . gone. Lost. He’d never felt so alone, stranded, and sick. He’d felt a riptide of despair pulling his brain back toward the cold zero. The only thing to do in a riptide is—don’t fight it—swim parallel to shore. He had plunged into the research, assessing the biohazards of the green world.

  From the cockpit, the shuttleplane’s pilot chimed in, “We’ve all got a touch of stasis fever.”

  “Including you?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s clearing up.”

  Joe said to Wing, “I thought you were down at the base already.”

  “I was. But the protocol is never to have a shuttle flight without one biologist aboard, someone who knows something about the terrain and the vegetation, in the event of—” Wing gestured, delicately glossing over the concept of emergency landing.

  The shuttle angled down from the Ship’s orbit and streaked across the planet’s nightside. With a blue splash of radiance, the hurricane moon rolled up from the horizon. Ironic, Joe thought, cosmically ironic that the diligent Ship had searched out a solar system where the habitable zone held not one but three planets. Joe turned toward Wing. “Haven’t I heard your name in connection with the Third Planet Option?”

  Wing nodded. “I’m no xenobiologist. My doctorate is in botany, and I did research in the fern family. But I think that thi
s world is unsafe for us to colonize, even if we burn bare arenas in which to settle. The Third Planet, though, is barren and lifeless already. When we left the Solar System, Mars was being terraformed with success. This one would turn out better.”

  “That’s not saying much,” interjected the pilot. “Secure your belts, gentlemen.”

  The bulk of the planet swelled. The big hurricane moon’s light stained the nightside, splashed vast splotches and streaks of cobalt across the topography.

  With a tremor that offended Joe’s stomach, the shuttleplane penetrated thicker atmosphere. Soon the shuttle shook. Gforces punched at his guts. Cursing the fever, he hoped that the antinausea drugs would do their job. A fiery friction mist swirled beyond his window.

  Finally the ride smoothed, to Joe’s relief. The window filled with the red light of a sun setting on the western horizon. Under that cataract of light, he could barely discern landscape hurtling by below. Eyes watering, he looked away. On the other side of the cabin, Wing sat glued to his window like a schoolboy on a field trip.

  The pilot sang out, “Welcome to the World Wide Park.”

  “This world reminds some people of a park,” Wing explained.

  “Why?” said Joe, genuinely surprised.

  “Because it seems to have mild weather, gentle topography, and no animals.”

  Joe had seen the reports that came up from Unity Base, but he had not paid attention to the emotional footnotes, the sentiments of the expedition team members. Now it might be useful to know how they felt about the planet. “No animals—how do people feel about that?”

  “Disappointed, on the whole. Hopes are high for discovering large sea creatures.”

  It wasn’t technically true that Green lacked animals. The world harbored plenty of animal biomass. Consisting, in the words of the microbiologist Srivastava, of “slugs, bugs, and crud.” Crud meaning microbes. “Such lovely crud!” Srivastava exclaimed. The microbial ecology was as elaborate and extensive as Earth’s, if not more so. Srivastava was the happiest scientist on the Ship.

  “This world is not a park,” Wing was saying. “There are no birds, no squirrels, no butterflies, and none of the flora which evolve together with the higher and more active animal life. Green has no flowers.”

  “S’okay,” said the pilot. “We brought our own. Big turn coming up, fellas.”

  “What about those slugs?” Joe asked Wing.

  Wing shrugged. “Large enough to have acquired a nickname. Zucchini slugs.”

  “Not anybody’s idea of interesting animal life, eh?”

  Adjusting its bite on the air around it, the shuttleplane turned back toward nightfall and moonlight. The red light of sunset in Joe’s viewport faded. His stomach protested. He clenched his teeth, determined not to retch.

  The pilot spoke, apparently addressing Unity Base. “Coming in on scenic route one. Over.” To his passengers he said, “The Third Planet doesn’t look very inviting compared to what’s down there.”

  “We are not invited,” Wing said with a sharp edge to his typically mild voice.

  Joe had already seen the land around Unity Base, on television, and had listened to explanations of its every feature, to the point of surfeit. He half watched the expanding landscape as the shuttle descended. Shallow lakes were strewn across a plain. Anaerobic bacteria tinted the lakes red and purple and chartreuse, like puddles of tempera paint. World Wide Park. An asinine idea, but one that might militate against holocaust. Joe didn’t want holocaustic site preparation to happen any more than Wing did, though probably for very different reasons.

  East of the anaerobic lakes, the land got higher and drier, a rumpled rug, its dark green nap worn and barren in places. Rain showers dotted the slight hills in the distance ahead. Taller than the other hills, Unity Mountain lifted its head above the showery clouds.

  “Look at the mountaintop,” Wing said somberly. “Even from here, you can see the absence of vegetation where we blasted the peak flat.”

  Flying too high and fast for a landing, the shuttle banked instead. Joe gritted his teeth and told his stomach to lie still. He began to anticipate meeting the expedition team at Unity Base. Few in number, they included a good third of the colony’s leaders—the most healthy and vigorous third. In the next hour or so, with his words and his science, he intended to chart the future of the colony. He folded his arms around his knotting and squirming stomach. His fingers found the smooth carbonglass shell of the notebook in the inner pocket of his jacket. His own notebook from Earth. It had made it across the stars too, with some electrons misplaced, so it had some odd bugs in it, but just as it had been his most prized possession on Earth, it was his only prized possession now.

  Wing’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Look at the roots of the mountain. I’ve been up to the Ship and back down again several times, but I’ve never seen that before—the vegetation looks maroon, like wine. That is the dusk. The red light of sunset and the blue light of the moon, making a winedark bath around the feet of the mountain,” he rhapsodized. “But the mountaintop—it is still sunlit. There is iron oxide in that bare soil. It looks red and raw.”

  “We’ll make grass grow over that,” the pilot said. “We haven’t had time for landscaping.”

  “Why don’t you shut up and fly?” Joe suggested.

  “Okay, I’ve got to shed more speed before we land on the mountaintop, and I’m going to do it by making turns.”

  Wing said to Joe, “Even the park lovers only understand nature when it is remade by the human hand. Broken and butchered first, and then lovingly remade.”

  “This world, as is, appeals to you?” Joe asked.

  “Yes. I don’t see a park made for us to find. Its ecosystem is alien yet beautiful. Life is abundant here, and without animal violence, so far.” He smiled. “Perhaps, if we leave this young world to itself, intelligence will arise by less bloody paths than on our world.”

  “Too late,” said Joe.

  Wing’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you mean?”

  With the toe of one long leg, Joe nudged the cockpit door. It clicked shut. The pilot did not need to hear this. “They’ve generated a hell of a lot of data down there at the base, all telemetered to my lab on the Ship, so my research has been going at full tilt. I’m going down to Unity Base to deliver my recommendation in person and explain the findings that support that recommendation. The expedition team will be happy to hear what I have to say.”

  “May I ask what you recommend?”

  “To colonize this world, without extraordinary precautions.”

  Wing looked appalled. “But you’re a molecular biologist, who should know about invisible biological danger! What about microbes?”

  The shuttle banked, high and hard. Joe swallowed the saliva of incipient airsickness. “The native microbes have two traits: specific adaptation to plants and slow activity including rates of mutation. On the molecular level, things happen slowly here compared with Earth. We, on the other hand, intruders that we are, have our own, exquisitely mutable terrestrial microbes. And razorsharp immune systems compared to those of the native organisms. They can’t hurt us.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Believe me, the data are convincing. Then there’s the fact that we brought science with us—in particular, a highly advanced level of molecular biology and genetic engineering. I guarantee you, we can outrun and outfight the native microorganisms.”

  Joe decided to let that sink in. Glancing out of the window, he saw clouds and one thunderhead in the sky around them as the shuttle turned again, circling Unity Mountain. The thunderhead, unlike the ominous anvils of Earth, looked pink and pudgy.

  “How can you reach conclusions without having been down there?” Wing demanded. “You have no firsthand knowledge of the planet.”

  “Not necessary. I model the data. I’m a scientist, not a naturalist.”

  “Isn’t it enough to conquer a lifeless world?” Wing flushed with anger. “Is it so much bet
ter to conquer a living one?”

  “You’d rather see it burned? Your Third Planet movement doesn’t stand a chance. But a lot of people—such as our pilot friend—will welcome my recommendation. If you pull with me, we may—barely—swing the balance away from local holocaust.”

  “If I didn’t fear the unknown here quite so much, I think I’d wish a plague on both your houses,” Wing said.

  The shuttle curved around the side of the mountain. In the dusky sky, the seamoon rolled by, shining blue and bright as a beacon. On the mountain below, in the maroon dusk zone, Joe saw a river, a trace of water on the densely vegetated slope. An instant later, it looked like blood, a bloodred trickle from the blasted mountaintop. The brief vision jolted him.

  The light did it. Light from a sun redder than Sol, setting, mixed with the big blue moon’s light. Such a dusk the human eye had never known before. The eye did not know how to interpret it. That, plus the fever and the guilt that Wing was trying to disseminate, had made him see blood on the mountain. He wiped clammy sweat from his forehead.

  “I don’t dispute your science,” Wing said. “Maybe we have the knowledge and the might to make ourselves at home here. But we don’t have the right.”

  “We reached the stars,” Joe said shortly. “That gives us the right.”

  The last of the energy of dropping out of space had been burned off. Joe felt the engines kick in and the shuttle climb toward Unity Base, the scenic tour mercifully over.

  “Open the cockpit door,” said Wing urgently. “Tell this character to stop showing off. We’re flying too close to the mountainside for safety.”

  Joe started to reach for the door, but glanced out through the viewport. He froze. The storm loomed over the shuttle now, a mass of cloud standing on a thick leg of precipitation. Lightning flickered in its belly.

  They hit the fringes of the thunderhead’s rains and winds. The shuttle quivered. Joe sagged back and pressed his notebook against his quaking stomach. With sick fascination, he watched the storm. The cloud and its rain looked wrong, the thunderhead misshapen and too smooth, the rain that issued from it flushed with a maroon color. He stared, trying to convince himself of the simple meteorological nature of the phenomena.