Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “That is more likely than allosaurs,” Wing said in a low voice. He eased past a thick skein of branches. Joe followed more clumsily.

  “More likely than allosaurs but still damn improbable,” said Joe. “I’m no fool. I recommended colonizing without extraordinary precaution because the findings are straightforward.” He patted the notebook, reassuring himself of its tangibility. “The idea of an alien virus scares the hell out of people who don’t know better. But viruses are parasites finetuned to their hosts. No mammals here means no virus even remotely prepared to exploit the mammalian organism. No alien virus is going to ambush us.”

  “Most regrettable,” said Wing, heading up a steep incline laced with roots and branches.

  “You’d rather drop dead?”

  “No. But if the prospect convinced the Vanguard not to colonize this world, I wouldn’t be sorry.” Wing emphatically pushed a fat leafy branch out of the way to climb past it. Joe failed to catch the branch before Wing released it, and it struck him in the face. Some kind of dust or pollen flew into his nose and mouth. Joe sneezed and coughed. “Keep your martyr complex to yourself!” he snarled.

  “Sorry about that!” Wing said.

  “How far do we still have to go?”

  “Less than half of the way. This world’s gravity is a bit less than that of Earth, and walking uphill is easier.” Wing paused to examine a branch in his way, squinting in the uncertain light. “Tetrapterous!”

  Joe asked, “How the hell can you be a field botanist and not want to live here?”

  “Oh, I do. But if we colonize this world, we will eventually wreck it. Come on. Night is falling.”

  The leafy trees thinned out slightly. But the gloom turned darker and less useful for seeing. The ground roughened. Joe stumbled on big rocks, making clumsy missteps that caused the sling to chafe the back of his neck. In what was left of the light, the way up the mountain looked steep and forbidding. Jagged stone outcrops slivered the starry sky.

  “This mountain is openly rocky only at its crown.” Wing sounded hopeful. “Our maps in Unity Base show quite a few dry streambeds running down the mountain. They seem to be the courses where rain or melting snow runs off in some seasons. At this time of year, the streambeds are dry and full of low vegetation, and may be the easiest way up.”

  “What if the vegetation has thorns?”

  “In the absence of animals here, that’s unlikely.”

  Because Wing hoped to strike a streambed, he angled up the mountainside. That was fine with Joe. The going was difficult enough without trying to go straight up. After the jolts of slipping and stumbling repeatedly, Joe’s shoulder began to ache again. And his good right hand accumulated still more scrapes. Blood, plant juice, dirt, water, and sweat mingled madly on his skin. He gritted his teeth and followed Wing.

  To make matters worse, his earlier delusion of being in the depths of the sea returned. This time he found himself obsessed with the idea of climbing up from the still, safe blue deep into a tumultuous surf. It became an act of will to put one foot in front of another. Even while cursing his brain for its gullibility, he experienced the irrational sensation of wave action rocking his body. He was racked by the feeling that, if he climbed higher, the surf would fling him against murderous rocks. In desperation, he determined to master the delusion and all of its relatives: to figure out why they happened.

  He went to work, attacked the facts with total intellectual concentration, made an allornothing contest of it. And won—a more personal victory than usual: his mind made logical sense of the circumstances that had been toying with his brain. The seadelusion dissolved.

  Joe grinned, an invisible expression. Night had fallen. In nearly total darkness, they had to inch along by feel.

  The land dipped, turning loose and pebbly as it did. “This is a nice wide dry waterway,” Wing panted.

  “Let’s go.” The uphill was hard, but it was getting them to the top of the mountain. Joe liked it better than beating through the alien bushes.

  Then Joe’s heel struck something soft and slippery, causing him to crash down on one knee. Wing was by his side instantly, helping him up. Joe’s knee hurt. He cursed furiously.

  “You stepped on the highest life-form of Green,” said Wing. “It was a zucchini slug.”

  Joe limped to a large rock and sat down on it to nurse his skinned knee, “Park, hell! This world’s way too weird to call it a park!”

  “I agree.” Wing seated himself on a boulder nearby.

  “You know, you really cracked up back there. In the bog. Anything like that ever happen to you before?”

  “Never.” Wing was a shadow with a rueful voice. “Smells often evoke nostalgia for me, but not as overwhelmingly as that.”

  “Did you see anything outside before we crashed that could have startled the pilot?”

  “No. Did you?”

  Joe described the delusion of mangled and bleeding clouds. “A sight like that, plus his ‘touch of fever,’ might explain his making a bad mistake.”

  “He was flying too close to the mountain for safety. People in Unity Base have tended to become careless, as if this were a park and we all came here on vacation.” Wing was silent for a moment. “What was it—the blood clouds?”

  “Water, air, and light,” said Joe. “And animal brains.”

  “We imagine violence when there isn’t any?”

  “No. Given hopelessly inconclusive data, our brains jump to conclusions.” Joe shifted to a less uncomfortable place on his rock. “What happens when you look at a visual paradox—an illogical drawing? Your brain shuttles between alternative interpretations, rather than dismiss the thing as impossible.”

  “But such inventions are indeed impossible. Unnatural. This place is utterly natural.”

  “That”—Joe stabbed at the talking shadow with his forefinger—”is a philosophical premise, not an experiential one! As you are wont to point out, my friend, we did not evolve here. For us this place is not natural! Now, if a smell drifts into your olfactory receptors, and it consists of complicated organic molecules unlike any on Earth—what does the brain make of it? Dismiss it as nonsense, or jump to a conclusion?”

  “Evidently the latter,” Wing admitted. “But if so, my brain has jumped to astonishing conclusions this evening. At one point, I smelled wet dog. And again gasoline. Then there was the hot sesame oil.”

  “Your wok bog produced a complicated smell with God only knows how many different organic volatiles, how many coincidental similarities to terrestrial molecules. What we had there was the olfactory equivalent of ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ Your brain was astonished. Jumped to a conclusion at random.”

  The shadow bobbed, Wing nodding. “But the blood clouds must have been a much simpler puzzle to the senses. How could that have so startled our pilot as to cause the crash?”

  “Right then, he hadn’t left himself much room for error,” said Joe. “Now, think about blue moonlight. In the context of our evolutionary history that’s unnatural. Bright blue moonlight—mixed with red sunlight—alien! And the clouds here look different—the gravity’s different—hell, the bottom line is an alien gestalt. Everything is slightly different. Adds up to a global intuition of impossibility, eh?”

  “Does that necessarily cause people to succumb to . . . ?”

  “Let’s say delusions. People go about their business, the sense of impossibility reaches critical mass, and then brains jump to deluded conclusions. Illogical ones, maybe disastrous ones.”

  The shadow moved as Wing went to stoop over the crushed slug. “I thought I saw the slug move and wondered if it was another illusion,” said Wing. “It wasn’t. Undertakers have arrived.”

  “Undertakers?”

  “Insects—or insect analogues. The ground is alive with them. They are stirring and digging, and the slug is disappearing into the ground.” Wing’s voice sounded strangled.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Joe said. Neither of them ment
ioned the dead pilot, lying under a broken frond on deep, rich, and possibly even more alive, squirming soil. Together they fled uphill.

  11 Night

  Loose rocks slid out from under Joe. He seized a bush. It doubled over like rubber, letting him fall flat and hard, which knocked the wind out of him. When Joe finished wheezing, Wing said, “Go by hand and foot. That way there is less far to fall.”

  The terrain got even worse. It turned into a jumble of rocks and plants. The stuff tended to slip, taking them with it in a shower of dirt and leaves. Joe’s shoulder hurt savagely. His thin, strained grunts sounded almost like whimpers.

  Wing paused. “Is the painkiller wearing off?” he asked, lightly touching Joe’s shoulder. “There’s another ampoule of it, if I can see to administer it in the dark.”

  “Do it after we’re out of this.”

  They crawled farther. “This is debris!” Wing exclaimed. “We’re near the top of the mountain. Material from the blast fell here.”

  Minutes later, they emerged from the jumbled plants and ground. A sky full of stars hung above them, and the mountain’s bare crown loomed ahead. With a groan, Joe lay flat.

  “Now for the medicine,” Wing said, briskly unrolling the first aid kit. “I can see fairly well. There’s so much starlight.” He carefully injected the painkiller, which stung.

  “Is that your Third Planet?” Joe pointed to an untwinkling, ruddy star.

  Wing sighed. “Yes.”

  “You’ve got a religious affinity for it,” Joe said. “Never mind the scientific camouflage, why are you convinced that we ought to start the colony there? Why shouldn’t we have a second chance to cooperate with nature—here?”

  “Since you ask,” Wing said, “because God has not given this world to us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “God gave us the Earth and its living things to name, to enjoy, to use. I cannot believe that the same rights extend to the universe and everything in it.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Believe me, I’ve been having my doubts about that,” Wing replied ruefully. “I don’t think we were supposed to stay on Earth forever, as fundamentalists of various faiths were insisting at the time we left. There was nothing morally wrong with making a journey to the stars, to terraform a barren land—working with sweat and sacrifice to build a good green home for our kind and the creatures which we brought with us in the Ship. It wasn’t a luxurious prospect. It was what all of us expected when we left Earth.”

  “So God gives us a better option,” said Joe. “Has the right to do that, eh?”

  “True,” Wing admitted. “But I believe that what we are given is not a better option, but a hard choice. To choose hard labor or sloth, humility or arrogance, sacrifice or greed. A wilderness or a park.” Looking up at the ruddy spark in the night sky, he continued sadly. “Almost no one seems to think that the choice is hard at all. Everyone assumes that this Green is a gift from God or from the universe.”

  Mercifully, Joe’s shoulder was going numb again. Three planets, he thought. The third was potentially habitable, provided that the present generation and a good many to come were willing to rough it. A second planet, the raw oceanic world: uninhabitable, so much so that no one except the planetary scientists had expressed any interest in ever going there. And then the first, this green world, immediately habitable, mild, tractable. Wing might be a religious unrealist, Joe reflected, but he had a good point. There would have been something ennobling about the challenge of molding a lonely globe in the wilderness of stars. Too bad that was unnecessary. Joe suspected that human nature would not be improved by the cosmic equivalent of a free lunch.

  Three planets, two, and one. Then and still there was the zero. The planet with the moon that had failed to be there. The zero moon stretched from Earth to here, eleven centuries long and thin, a string of cold nothingness, attenuated death.

  “Joe. Joe Devreze—or Toronto. Wake up.”

  Joe started, surprised to be alive.

  “Either the painkiller or my sermon put you to sleep. How do you feel?”

  “The painkiller worked.” He carefully climbed to his feet and took deep breaths. “You know, I can’t feel the stasis fever anymore. Maybe the exercise burned it out.”

  “I hope so,” Wing answered.

  The last climb turned out to be strenuous, but safe and fast. They ascended from one terrace of the waterway to the next. The pure white light of the stars made it easy to find hand and footholds. “Onward and upward!” said Joe, in a triumphant mood.

  Trees of a new kind perched along the waterway: short, scrubby, and pungent. “Furry pines!” Wing said excitedly. “These are the dominant vegetation at the top of the mountain. I have studied samples of them. But I did not know that they smelled so—like celery?”

  “I get seashells. You know, used ones. Or else antiseptic. Contradictory as hell, eh?”

  The waterway petered out. They pushed their way into a stand of furry pines. Some of the trees leaned outward at a twentydegree angle, with broken branches and roots half pulled out of the ground. The damaged ones were resolutely thick with living needles.

  Joe laughed. “Tough little beggars!”

  Then they encountered scorched and shattered pines. Hurriedly they scrambled through, and over, those. A heavy smell hung in the air: the stink of combustion, Joe guessed, though his brain came up with several odors wildly unrelated to burned cellulose.

  A ridge of dirt marked the edge of the mountaintop crater. Shallow and wide, it curved away into the distance on both sides. In the crater’s center, a quarter of a mile away, stood the geodesic dome of Unity Base, an angular bubble lit from within by yellow light. No fencing surrounded the dome. No floodlights stood guard over it. None were needed on this world.

  Wing slowly seated himself on a fallen pine’s trunk, near the edge of the crater. After a few moments, Joe sat down beside him. Exhilaration had vanished. Joe felt drained.

  “Haven’t heard the copter since the first time,” said Joe.

  “I see it parked on its pad, almost behind the dome.”

  A few minutes later, Joe blurted, “They’re clean in there.”

  “I know,” Wing whispered.

  “We ought to go knock on the door,” said Joe, with a complete lack of conviction.

  Neither of them moved. An idiotic thought popped into Joe’s head. If they knocked on the dome, maybe the bubble would burst and disintegrate. He picked up a handful of small rocks and pitched them, one by one, back to the ground. Ejecta from the blast that flattened the mountain’s crown, these rocks had fresh sharp edges. Finally Joe said angrily, “Why aren’t they looking? They ought to hope that we’re still alive, and they know we’re not necessarily sick!”

  “They do?”

  “Before I left the Ship, I transmitted my recommendation to the chief expedition scientist with an abstract of the findings that led to the recommendation. I’d have thought he’d send a search party out!”

  “Maybe he didn’t agree with your recommendation. Perhaps no one did and there were no volunteers.”

  “God-almighty-damn!” Joe exploded. “What time is it? I had a wristwatch. I lost it.”

  “No, I took it off, fearing that your arm might swell.” Wing handed over the expedition-issue analogue wristwatch.

  “Stopped. Reads two hours since we left the Ship!” Joe hurled the watch onto the ashy ground.

  Wing went over and ferreted among the ashes to find the watch. “It’s still running. I’m not sure we had so very far to come. If our other senses are disoriented, why not the sense of time as well?”

  “Maybe, but we can’t wait all—”

  A brighter pane of yellow light fell out of the dome: a door had opened. A small group of people emerged. They wore landsuits, but no helmets, and they looked loaded with gear, ropes, flashlights, pickaxes, bags.

  Joe leaped to his feet and whistled. Wing shouted, “This way!”

 
The search party hesitated, two of them pointed excitedly, and then they all came toward Joe and Wing at a run. The person in the lead looked familiar. Catharin. Joe was struck by her beauty. Wing could talk all night about Green being beautiful, but this planet was intolerably weird. Beauty was the tall, fair woman running toward him, with cold bright starlight glazing her hair and clothes.

  About two yards away, Catharin stopped so abruptly that the other three in her group almost collided with her. In an awkward silence, Joe put his grubby free hand into his pocket. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Congratulations, we found you.”

  “Thank goodness.” Her glance slid to Wing. “Carlton! I am so glad to see you! What about—”

  “The pilot’s dead,” said Joe.

  “Oh, dear God. We thought, we hoped, that it was just a forced landing, and all three of you were all right,” Catharin said unevenly.

  “It wasn’t a forced landing. The plane crashed,” Joe said.

  “It had to do with freak meteorological conditions,” Wing explained.

  “You’re going to have to settle for two out of three,” Joe said curtly.

  Catharin looked at him hard, taking in the sling around his arm, his torn and dirtied clothing, the scratches on his face.

  The man’s ego shrank. He felt like a little boy who had wandered away from home and found himself in some vaguely understood but awful trouble.

  “Joe,” she said, “I have to ask you this. Do you feel well?”

  Catharin’s search party paid close attention.

  Joe nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Apart from a fractured shoulder and being souped up on painkillers, yes!”

  “I can’t believe you, Joe,” she said in a low voice. “You have stasis fever if nothing else. I want both of you to answer this question: Do you think that the other is well?—Carlton?”

  Joe felt his heart drumming out anxiety.

  “On the way down from the Ship, he looked haggard,” Wing said. “The stasis fever look. Then the crash injured him. Afterwards, though, he’s been alert and rational. He speculated that exercise had driven out the fever. That could be. He’s had a sort of pained vigor this evening.”