Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  She sighed. “Joe?”

  “He’s seemed fit as a fiddle to me.”

  The doctor smiled slightly. “Now I believe you.”

  Catharin’s people relaxed, whispered comments to one another. Joe was flooded with warm, giddy relief.

  “We’ll still have to take certain precautions with you two—,” Catharin began.

  “I know. We’ll camp out for a few weeks.”

  “Oh, you won’t have to camp out. They’re setting up a medical isolation room right now, attached to the dome.”

  “No need to go to too much trouble,” said Wing.

  “He’d rather stay outside with the plants,” Joe said. “Found lots of interesting ones tonight—he’d have been sorry if you’d interrupted us on the way up. Can’t say I enjoyed the hike too much, though,” Joe added pointedly.

  “I’m sorry it took us so long to get organized,” she answered. “Initially there was confusion and dismay. Then Aaron Manhattan read us your recommendation—about the safety factor for colonizing—and asked for volunteers for a search party to go out immediately. Captain Bixby vetoed that idea; he insisted on absolutely stringent precautions before a search attempt.”

  Joe cursed the Captain under his breath.

  “He can’t order people to take outrageous chances,” Catharin said sharply.

  “But people can take chances on their own,” someone chimed in.

  “And so,” Catharin continued, “we took a vote on how to search. Not whether, how. It was decided about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “He’s put the base under quarantine,” someone added. “But that won’t last too long, if nothing happens.”

  “Nothing’ll happen,” said Joe.

  And they took his word for it. Catharin’s party began to stray. They moved in different directions, nudging the rocks with their toes, examining the wrecked pines, scratching the itch of curiosity about the place. Unconsciously, though, they fanned out in such a way as to keep their distance from Joe and Wing.

  “So my recommendation struck you people at Unity Base as convincing enough to act on,” said Joe, with satisfaction.

  Catharin gave him a quizzical look. “Well, Aaron stood behind your scientific conclusions. But really . . . .”

  “Really what?”

  “We tend to compare this world to a park. Most of us are city people with fond memories of our parks. Central Park. Golden Gate Park. Don’t you have one too?”

  “Centre Island,” Joe said reluctantly.

  “There you are. As far as I can tell, your scientific conclusions are perfectly sound. But the idea that this world is a park is what made us bolder.”

  Wing said quietly, “Parks do not have blood clouds.”

  “Or wok bogs.” Joe exchanged a somber look with Wing.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Catharin.

  “Our pilot, may he rest in peace, taught us an important lesson,” said Wing. “There’s peril for us here, because this is not the world on which our senses and our minds evolved.” He pointed to the golden dome of Unity Base. “That alone is Earth.”

  Catharin looked back at the dome. A wind from nameless latitudes blew some of the long strands of her hair across her face. “The dome is Earth for now, not forever,” she said calmly. “We’ll adapt to this world and adapt it to our needs. I agree, though, that the middle of the night isn’t the best time to explore. Regroup, people,” she ordered. “Let’s go home.”

  Joe said, “Home nev—er looked so good.” His voice betrayed him by breaking. Joe stood there as if rooted to the ground, incapable of taking steps toward the dome. He felt damnably grubby and ashamed to advance into the clear yellow light.

  Catharin extended a gloved hand to Wing. “You can go back to study the plants you discovered tonight.” Then she offered her other hand to Joe. Hers closed gingerly around his. Her glove felt dry and cool. She led them toward the dome, the yellow bubble under the strange dense stars.

  12 The Brightness Before The Dawn

  Joel Atlanta, Starship’s pilot, had taken the Captain’s chair in the conference room. In one private corner of his mind, he marveled that he felt at ease in the Captain’s place.

  Across the table from Joel sat Kay Montana, newly revived from stasis, an ex-military space pilot who looked the part. Kay had short brown hair, a lanky build, and an alert bony face. “I’ll be pilot in command of the interplanetary explorer Lodestar, as per the Mission Book. Roger that.”

  At Joel’s left, Marie Mike Sisseton observed Kay closely. Joel did not take Sisseton’s presence as reason for him not to evaluate Kay in his own fashion. Kay’s psychology might be Sisseton’s puzzle, but her flying was Joel’s. He noted the clarity of Kay’s grasp of what she had been told, and the satisfaction in her voice as she continued, “After the check flights, Lodestar will be commissioned to explore this solar system for resources, asteroids and such with minable minerals, and in addition, Lodestar will serve as a platform for scientific studies of the blue moon. Happy to be up, sir.”

  “There’s one more job for you,” said Joel. “You’ll copilot our orbit-to-ground shuttleplane on every flight.”

  Kay’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t train for that.”

  Catharin had once told Joel about the right way to break bad news in the doctor business: succinctly work up to the bad part, giving the patient and family a vital few moments to brace themselves. Joel figured the same approach would work in anybody’s business. “Five days ago, our other shuttle was making an approach to Unity Base when it crashed on the mountainside.” Kay stiffened. Joel continued, “It came down in dense forest. The machine was wrecked. Both passengers came out alive, though one was injured. Unfortunately, the shuttle pilot died. His name was Jason Scanlan, in case you knew him.”

  She was hardheaded, but not emotionless. Sorrow flickered across her face. “Slightly, sir. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Because of the crash, the passengers may have been exposed to alien microorganisms or toxins, but a rescue party from the Base brought them in anyway. So the whole Base is under quarantine for six weeks, while the two are kept in relative medical isolation.” Please God, nothing bad happens to anybody, especially not to Cat. . . . “That crash is the reason we’re never going to fly the shuttle again without a copilot. As you probably realize by now, this is what the Book called a post-starflight contingency briefing.”

  The Book also said the Captain would be the one to brief Kay in an event like this, so Joel added, “Captain Bixby’s ill today. I believe you’ve been told how long stasis lasted on this trip. The fallout from that includes malaise and transient illnesses. How do you feel?”

  “Fine.” She sat up straighter. “Was the crash malaise-related?”

  “Wind shear was probably the direct cause of the crash. But only after Scanlan was distracted by a weird cloud.”

  “Cloud?” Kay echoed in a disbelieving tone.

  “The key word is ‘distracted,’“ Joel said grimly. “Everybody on flight status will soon be asked to submit to psychological tests. This is Dr. Marie Mike Sisseton. She’s a human factors psychologist.”

  Dr. Sisseton nodded. Kay looked alarmed. “I passed a lot of psychological screening tests to get here.”

  “We all did,” Joel answered. “But we don’t know enough about how anybody reacts to an alien environment, because we’ve never had people in one.”

  “The reason for more testing goes beyond that,” said Dr. Sisseton. A chunky woman with tawny skin and dark hair, she was what they’d have called a half-breed in the old days: half Caucasian and half Amerindian. She sounded like 100 percent psychologist to Joel, with a jag that struck her as vitally important and Joel as nebulous at best. Altered human factors. Which she now brought up for Kay’s benefit. “Your work as a space pilot takes place at the interface of a machine cognizance—your spaceship—and a cognizant machine—the human intellect. Due to the high intelligence of both, it is a very complicated interface.” Sisset
on shot Joel a significant look.

  I know, I know, and you think it’s more of the same between the Ship and the humans interfacing it, and I think you’re chasing blue moonbeams. He couldn’t argue with her in his capacity as Captain’s proxy, but if she rambled on, he’d cut her short.

  Sisseton did not, however, ramble. “If your intellect is subtly altered by biochemical changes induced by stasis, it introduces an element of unpredictability into an already complicated picture. This could adversely affect operations in space as well as on the planet.”

  Joel said, “The only problems we’ve had are Downstairs. The blood clouds were a wild card because we don’t understand the meteorology on Green.”

  Sisseton said, “But sooner or later—and Kay, you need to be alert to this in your role as pilot-in-command of the interplanetary explorer—there will be a lapse in which the predictable fails to be predicted; something foreseeable goes unforeseen. The results could be consequential if not disastrous.”

  Detecting their discord, Kay looked from one to the other.

  “We’ll be careful, but we won’t overanticipate imaginary trouble,” said Joel, and he had the last word, because the telcon screen on the wall of the conference room jingled an alarm and turned itself on to reveal Lary Siroky-Scheidt’s face, his bristly red eyebrows elevated in alarm. “We can’t contact the Base!”

  Carlton Wing awoke with a start. His roommate in this makeshift observation facility attached to Unity Base was Joe Toronto, and Joe often tossed and muttered in his sleep. But Joe’s fitfulness wasn’t what woke Wing up this time. The shack had a plaxglass window set in its outside door. Green light poured through the window in waves, pulses of shocking illumination that fell onto the floor and Joe’s form. Joe flung an arm over his eyes but did not rouse.

  Groggy, Wing’s mind fluttered around in English—perilous alien world!—and Cantonese—demons?!—and settled on Church Greek: Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy. With that, he took a deep breath and crept to the window to look out.

  The sky glared green. The light reminded him of fungi they’d seen coating a tree on the long night’s walk up the mountainside. Wing felt the hair on the nape of his neck stand erect. Could it be a morbid hallucination, the first sign of the contagion the blonde doctor had been watching for? But beneath sharp anxiety, Wing’s mind felt ordered and logical, and he didn’t think this was a hallucination. He braced his nerves, opened the door, and leaned outside.

  The green light blotted out the northern half of the starry heavens. Brilliant in the center of its region, it faded to a gauzy glow toward east, west, and zenith.

  Sunrise was not far off. But that light wasn’t the sun, unless the world had spun madly off its axis, which seemed unlikelier than contagion in his brain. The furry pines at the rim of the mountaintop pointed toward the sky with the same erect poise as ever, needles remarkably distinct in the eerie illumination.

  Noise reached Wing’s ears. Unity Base was astir. The Base resounded with agitation. He waited. People emerged from the main door, a quarter of the way around the dome from where he stood. He could see their hands gesturing toward the sky.

  The light slowly rippled as he watched. It began to look familiar to Wing. He began to think that he had seen pictures of such a phenomenon before.

  Aurora.

  It was natural light, not contagion in his own brain. Wing relaxed slightly. There was nothing wrong with him. In several more weeks, the doctor would release him from this peculiar observation situation, and he could resume doing the lesser part of that for which he had come to the stars.

  His resume showed scientific credentials in botany with an emphasis on ferns with years of field work in China and Australia. The resume also listed ordination in the Reformed Evangelical Catholic—New Catholic—Church. Dr. Catharin Gault had taken the ecclesiastical part of his resume to be a sideline, and had revived him to study plants. So here he was, a botanist still, but a priest no longer, because a priest in his Church had neither ordination nor calling without a congregation. His congregation remained in stasis in the Ship. The several New Catholics in Unity Base were disinterested in practicing the faith.

  He had almost, but not quite, forgiven the beautiful blond doctor for waking him up so far out of his place.

  A person approached. Wing recognized the stocky stature of Samantha Berry, the ecologist. She stopped when thirty feet of ground separated them. “Carl, what do you make it out to be?!” Samantha yelled, waving at the sky.

  “An aurora,” he called back.

  “The hell you say!”

  “It’s a mighty aurora, to be visible so close to the world’s equator.”

  “Well, hell, that explains the communications problem!”

  “What problem?!”

  “We can’t get through to the Ship. The channels are full of static. We’re on our own.”

  The aurora showed no sign of fading. And the Ship, source of all knowledge, could not tell them what the storm of light in the sky would do next. Or what safety precautions they should take now. As Berry turned away, Wing shivered, feeling threatened. And very alone.

  His extended family was still in stasis too. His younger aunts and uncles, his cousins and nieces—two dozen descendants of the first Carlton Wing, an intrepid man who emigrated from Canton to San Francisco in the early twentieth century. His sons had prospered in San Francisco. His grandsons had been prominent people, some businessmen and others clergymen, the whole family pillars of the Chinatown Christian community. The great-grandsons and great-granddaughters had not made the decision to journey to the stars lightly—or individually, either. The Carlton Wing on Planet Green felt like a fish astray from its school, a minor flash in a wide and very dangerous sea. He wasn’t one of the cohesive Vanguard—and thanks to the crash and exposure to the alien biota, he was consigned to medical observation. He was suspect.

  The green aurora awoke every particle of his sense of lonely vulnerability and drove the feeling into the deepest recesses of his heart.

  Joel’s first response to the Big Picture was “Lord almighty!” Fire crowned the green world—stupendous, lopsided ovals of auroral light surrounded both poles.

  Bix charged into the control center right after him. Bix had dragged himself up out of sickbay at the emergency call.

  “It’s Blue’s effect!” Lary explained excitedly. “The sun blows Blue’s magnetosphere out on the side away from the solar wind. A magnetotail, that is, and it’s long enough to reach Green when the orbital geometry is just right. Ions are flooding through the magnetotail into Green’s magnetosphere and creating an auroral display.”

  “So there’s a geomagnetic storm in progress,” Joel said, glad to have solid technical words for it. “Which is why we can’t contact the Base.”

  “There should be a usable wavelength somewhere. Get on it,” Bix said, causing a scramble of activity at several stations. “Are the folks Downside in any danger?”

  “The most pronounced auroras are in the four a.m. to noon section of the planet,” Lary answered. “What time is it Downside? I see, it’s before dawn down there. They’re getting a light show, but everybody should be safe in bed. A lot of their instruments are useless right now, but they probably aren’t turned on in the first place.”

  Bix sat down at the Command station. Bix never settled into a chair in an emergency. So he must really be feeling bad. “We’re lucky it happened at night,” Bix said. “If they’d had an aircraft up, it’d have mucked with the instruments.”

  “Lary,” said Joel, “I want to ask you something. Don’t take this the wrong way, like I’m jumping on you—I’m not. We’ve all got our hands more than full. This event is disruptive—and if they’d had planes aloft, it could have been really dangerous—but was it foreseeable?”

  “Completely,” Lary said. He was pinker than usual. Embarrassed. “I ought to have known this could happen and when.”

  “Who else should have foreseen it?” Joel asked. The cont
rol center became impressively quiet for a huge room with almost thirty people in it.

  “I would have thought, um, the oversight teams—all three shifts of them—and the contingency planners, and even the Intelligence running the future planetary modeling. . . . I don’t know why this fell into the cracks. Maybe because we think of Blue as a moon. Our own Moon didn’t have a liquid core and magnetosphere.”

  Joel felt eyes boring into his back. He turned to meet Marie Mike Sisseton’s somber gaze.

  At least she didn’t say “I told you so” out loud.

  13 Unity Base

  Gratitude, and the sheer relief of being alive, and the comfort of having his injuries tended by the doctor, had worn thin. Joe glared at the hut’s inner door, the one leading to the bulk of the Ubase bubble, to which this hut was attached like an excrescence. Initially he had called the makeshift quarantine facility the Outhouse. Wing had managed to substitute the word Penthouse.

  For twenty of Green’s long days the doctor had confined the two of them to the Penthouse as she waited for signs of infection from alien microbes: symptoms that would never materialize. The world’s bland, green impression was misleading—accidents could happen!—but it was a safe enough place. Let them call it the World Wide Park, Joe thought. And let me out of here.

  The other door of the Penthouse—the exit onto the outdoors of the mountaintop—opened with a brief cascade of orange sunset light and a gust of chilly air that brought Wing in with it. “I’m back!” He pushed the door shut against the wind.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Wing emptied his pockets of several handsful of colored pebbles. Singing to himself in Cantonese, he made neat piles of glossy pebbles—yellow, red, and other assorted colors—on the floor.