Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “Hell, it’s close enough.”

  “We need ironclad conclusions. Because when the Colonial Government is revived, they’re going to second-guess our every move and look for someone to blame for everything that’s gone wrong. Which is a lot.” She frowned at that thought. “Write out your assessment of the virus and put some polish on it while the researchers Upside figure out the antiviral therapy. Then add your signature, and that should do it.”

  “That’ll take tonight. So what do I do tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” she said crossly. “You may be revving to go, but I’ve got to write up a report about today’s incident.”

  “That’s your problem. I can’t do it for you,” he pointed out.

  Catharin regarded him with narrowed eyes. “You could take your plane ride.”

  “Huh?”

  “That was originally planned. An aerial, VIP-tour survey with Becca Fisher in the mapping plane. Remember?”

  Joe also remembered mentioning to the doctor that he’d had recurrent nightmares about the shuttleplane crash.

  “She’s a good pilot.” Catharin sounded graciously encouraging, which had a highly irritating effect on Joe. “She won’t crash through carelessness. And going up in the air again—or more to the point, coming down without incident—might do you good.”

  Joe was very unwilling to commit himself to another aircraft. And angry that the doctor had figured that out.

  Eddy brought coffee in plain, white, expedition-issue cups. He was on the slender side, with a silky mane of brown hair that curled over the white collar of his lab coat, and a certain grace of movement, and he watched Joe with discreet interest. Joe recognized the pattern. “I think I know why it occurred to Hoffmann to throw blood. He had AIDS in mind, eh?”

  “That was ancient history,” Eddy objected.

  “But memorable.”

  “You’re right,” said Catharin. “I’ll add that. In addition to hypochondria, possible homophobia. Eddy, would you record your side of the incident? For the official log, so watch your words. He might have had other blood-borne viruses like Ebola in mind too. What a warped bastard. That’s unofficial.” Coffee cup in hand, she went over to the telcon. “Joe, let me show you how to ring up the Ship.” But instead of his lab up there, she addressed the control center.

  “Hi, Cat!” said the man who answered. Joe recognized the Ship’s pilot, Atlanta.

  “Hi, Joel. How soon can you get that relay satellite deployed? I need it more than ever.”

  “Within the week.”

  “That’s lovely.” The mask was down again. Catharin clearly liked Joel Atlanta. Today Joe had seen her drop the mask today for Wing, Fisher, Eddy, and Atlanta. She seemed to wear the mask just for Joe Toronto.

  She transferred the link to the Ship’s research center. “All yours. By the way,” said Catharin, “do you still have any nightmares, anxieties, other disturbances?”

  “No. Go diagnose somebody else,” he said. “I’m no more vulnerable than the rest of ‘em.”

  “And no less,” she said.

  Within an hour, Joe discovered that the telcon had only a rudimentary handwriting recognition function. The primary mode of data entry was a keyboard. He only had a vague idea of how to use it. “This technology was outdated a hundred years ago!”

  “No, it was never totally superseded in the medical field, where the need for unambiguous data entry has always been paramount.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, demonstrating her expertise.

  Joe felt one-upped, cut off from a machine he needed for his work and his happiness, and furious. But he didn’t dare explode. Not to the doctor watching him for mental symptoms. “Voice recognition?” he asked gruffly.

  “It does have that,” she said, and activated it.

  The mess hall was a wedge of the dome, kitchen at the small end, tables at the large end, resounding with clatter proportional to the dozen or so people eating supper at present. They were a mixture of races and sorts, but uniformly healthy and energetic. And egalitarian, with duty insignia adorning the coverall sleeves, but no badges of rank.

  One stood out in the crowd: a dark-skinned brunette who looked like a Euro-North Indian urban racial blend. She made a point of being introduced to Joe, following that up with the necessary maneuvers to gain an introductory conversation with him. Her name was Maya London. She was Manhattan’s administrative assistant.

  Maya was interested in Joe and less discreet about it than Eddy. She assumed that he was heterosexual and that she was the most beautiful woman in the hall. Both assumptions were reasonably accurate. Joe appreciated the dramatic curves of her body while answering her questions about his work. He registered the mesmerizing quality of her jade-green eyes shuttered by dark lashes. There was one final assumption on her part, not intended to show, but it did: that she could have him if she tried hard enough. Maybe, Joe thought, but not tonight, because he wanted to use the telcon.

  Joe gave Maya enough attention to indicate that he had nibbled the bait. With a concluding pleasantry, she went away—like an angler careful not to frighten the fish, not let it know the bait had a hook embedded in it.

  The bulletin board in Medical bore numerous notices for meetings. There seemed to be some kind of meeting for some subset of the Base population scheduled for almost every hour of the day. Teamwork, teamthink, Joe thought.

  More informative was the chart that correlated clock time with local sun time. Green’s solar day was about fifty-two hours long: two terrestrial days plus a bit. Somebody had concocted a hybrid clock system, twenty-six hours plus a.m and p.m. Divide the hours after 1300 by two and note the a.m. or p.m. distinction to translate back to Earthlike times of day, the chart suggested. So the 1400 p.m. that Joe had seen earlier on the telcon was seven p.m.—about right for the onset of midsummer, midlatitude twilight.

  Reveling in the use of the telcon, Joe worked while the digits of the clock at the bottom of the screen flicked in the direction of midnight, 0000 a.m. Suddenly Eddy rocketed in. “Where’s the doctor?!”

  “In her office.”

  Eddy raced out. Joe heard Eddy pounding on Catharin’s office door down the hall. Joe caught the words, “Suicide attempt!” The doctor and her nurse left Medical in a hurry.

  Joe signed off the telcon when people poured into Medical carrying in the victim, a small blonde woman with bloody wrists. Wing ushered a brown-skinned, Afro-Asian woman who seemed particularly agitated. Eddy informed Joe in passing, “They have a two-person bunk room, and it was her roommate who found her bleeding.”

  It took nearly an hour to settle things. Catharin bandaged and sedated the victim, settling her into the infirmary. Manhattan showed up for a while to look appropriately grave. Wing eased the shaken roommate out of Medical. Eddy cleaned up the floor. When calm finally prevailed, and only Joe was standing nearby, Catharin leaned against the wall, looking drained. “My God, what am I up against?”

  “Think of it as job security,” said Joe offhandedly.

  She grabbed his sleeve and towed him around the corner into the privacy of the lab. Fiercely, she said, “You do not understand the situation. The stasis changed some viruses and microorganisms that came with us. We could experience virulence that’s never been seen before, upon exposure to triggers that we can’t predict!”

  “You underestimate me, Doctor,” said Joe, intrigued by her ferocity and intelligence. He removed her fingers from his sleeve and pushed her hand back against her ribs. “I do understand the situation. The genetic material in stowaway viruses was changed by the combination of radiation and dark reactions in the presence of stasis chemicals. Show me the gene map of the expected viruses and I can predict mutations and virulence.”

  Her eyes widened. “So easily?”

  “Ease is relative. Viruses are simple. The human genome isn’t. What I can’t predict is how stasis changed us.”

  She winced as though he had hit a sore nerve. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Aren’t
you?”

  “Afraid of mutations in the human genome? Sure. Genetic change usually means death or ill-fitness in an organism. But there’s a chance of something better. Transformation. Something new.”

  She was shaking her head. “Joe, the thought of something alien in our genes keeps me awake at night.”

  “It’s not alien.” Surprised that he felt inclined to explain the foundation of his scientific life to a woman he hardly knew and didn’t like, he went on, “The terrestrial genome simmers with latent change. It always has. If the change confers any advantage that lasts until reproductive maturity, the genes will perpetuate themselves.

  “Genes are still selfish. The genome is more like itself than ever. That’s what the new virus has to teach us,” he said emphatically, feeling the stirring of his oldest and surest, but long dormant, sense of wonder. “The genome still has imagination.”

  14 Raining Blue

  Catharin had to get away from Joe Toronto, but retreating into her bunk room didn’t work. Her thoughts bounced off the bare walls in distracting Brownian motion. Finally she resorted to the observation deck. Glad to find the deck deserted, she sat down beside the conference room’s outer wall, huddled against the chill of the long summer night.

  Today had made her feel as though she lived in a shaky house of cards that had fallen apart, knocked down by Fredrik Hoffmann. His illness troubled her. The man himself she hated, and found it cold comfort that the feeling was more than mutual. Then there was poor Sheryn: unhappy enough to make a bloody, botched attempt at suicide. Had Sheryn been the vulnerable flash point for the stresses that afflicted all of them? Catharin now had two unexpected new patients, while Joe Toronto wasn’t just a patient anymore. He was loose, willful, and every bit as perversely attractive as in the interview light-years ago.

  In her fallen house of cards, what kind of scattered card was Joe? Wild card or, as she had long hoped, her ace in the hole, her best chance for saving the bad genetic situation?

  Pushed by the wind, clouds streamed across the night sky. The hurricane moon shone through thin spots in the cloud cover with a blue glare. The blue-tinged clouds changed shape as she watched, fluid as troubled water, chaotic.

  Everything that had happened since Aeon left Earth bore the mark of chaos: disasters and opportunities that the exhaustive, all-encompassing training before the star flight had never anticipated. Vandal stars and double planet, illness and genetic damage. Now Hoffmann going berserk and Sheryn attempting suicide.

  Joe had blithely informed her that the genome—the human genome—was shot through with chaos. Chaos reigns. And when it rains it pours. A shower spilled out of the clouds, brief rain splashing on the deck just beyond the sheltering overhang of the dome’s roof. The radiance from the hurricane moon tinted the rain blue.

  Catharin found herself feeling something she couldn’t account for: unfairness. Joe had kick-started it, but not by doing anything unfair. So far, he was better behaved as a researcher than he had been as a patient. It was his commentary about the genome that obscurely outraged her.

  The blue rain peppered the deck, making a scant sound in the overwhelming silence of the mountaintop. Once, in Earth’s Africa, Catharin had listened to a jungle from the safety of the veranda of a guest lodge. There she’d heard mating frogs, a scavenger’s howl, the shriek of a dying prey animal. This place was more silent than it was at peace. It knew no animal lust or violence. “Nature red in tooth and claw” did not apply here.

  But genes were still savagely indifferent to human welfare. There lay the unfairness, Catharin thought with sudden harsh clarity. It was vastly unfair, a cosmic joke in wretched taste. After millennia of disease-ridden history, humanity had forged real understanding of the genetic and microbiological roots of illness. Medicine had attained a panoply of cures and preventions, even reining in the chaos of the genome and the selfishness of the genes.

  And stasis pervasively hurt the human body at the molecular level. Stasis had disrupted humanity at the level of genes. It was as if Aeon had hurtled back in time to when illness was more universal and omnipotent.

  The rain paled, became as colorless as ordinary water. Then it stopped. The clouds had lost their blue tinges, so thoroughly did they obscure the moon. Or else Blue’s light had all rained down onto the face of Green. . . . Catharin entertained that speculation, with mild amusement, for just a moment too long. The irrational idea morphed into terror that Blue had turned into rain. She fled from the deck.

  Bursting into Becca’s office in the hangar behind Unity Base, Catharin smelled the aroma of Earl Grey tea. Becca looked up from a stack of small parts with a smile. “After the tough day you’ve had, I thought you might drop in. I made your favorite tea for you.”

  Catharin felt cold—unaccountably so from only a half hour’s exposure to a mild night. Shivering, she explained Joe’s view of the genome. Then she described the blue rain. “It spooked me. I don’t know why. I’m not losing my mind too, am I?” She gulped the hot, fragrant tea.

  Nothing ever left Becca at a loss for words or wits, not even this. “Have you ever heard of that ancient—really ancient, it was made before computer graphics—vid called The Ten Commandments? There’s a part where the last of the twelve plagues, the angel of death, visits the land of Egypt. And there’s no wings, no sword, no sickle—at the time, they couldn’t do convincing special effects for something like that. So there’s just a dark cloud in the sky. This cloud drifts down onto the land, into the city, and creeps through the streets as fog, and the firstborn children die. It’s a scary scene.”

  Catharin slowly nodded. “That is what I fear the most. Plagues and death with no effective medical defenses, and genetic disorders killing our firstborn children. I don’t think I can stand to think about it anymore.”

  “So how do you like working with Joe?” Becca asked.

  “In a word, I don’t. He’s brilliant, egotistical, and cavalier.” Catharin added ruefully, “But fascinating. If I’d met him on Earth, say, at a conference, I’d have considered skipping out so we could get to know each other socially.”

  “Would he play hooky? Or be too absorbed in the conference?” Becca asked. “For some scientists, personal relationships are strictly sideline stuff.”

  Catharin felt a welter of intuition crystallize into a startlingly certain answer. “I could convince him to play hooky.”

  Catharin was feeling better when they left the hangar together to return to the dome. The concrete apron around the hangar shone damp. The blue moon floated above the furry-pine fringe of the mountaintop. “It’s still blue,” Catharin said wryly. “I guess it really was my imagination, not the moon’s blue raining down on us, and not a screw loose in my mind.”

  Becca chuckled. “Of course not. You’re no lunatic.”

  Catharin mentally stumbled over the word Becca had used, deeply startled by it. “I just finally added two and two. Blue was full the night the shuttle crashed, and it’s full again. And the word ‘lunacy’ meant the dire effect of Earth’s Moon—”

  The giant blue moon’s light washed over them both, shining in Becca’s widened eyes. “You think it might affect our minds? Let’s get inside!” She led a dash to the nearest Base door and slammed it behind them, sealing out the moonlight. “I don’t know if you’re right, but I could believe it.”

  Catharin’s heart pounded in fright. She felt safer in here than out in the open. But not much safer. “Months ago, I helped Lary justify doing research on Blue by emphasizing that Blue would affect people. But I hadn’t connected that to the experience of being here. I’ve been too fixated on immediate medical problems.”

  Becca said emphatically, “Getting scared about it raining Blue was your unconscious saying you should recognize the danger right away, before anything else goes wrong.”

  A thundering, mechanical noise jarred Joe awake.

  For a disoriented few moments Joe stared at the ceiling of the Penthouse that slanted down toward his toes. T
hen he identified the racket as the helicopter circling Unity Base.

  Wing sat up in his own bunk, looking rumpled but thrilled. “Since we’re out of observation confinement, we can go meet the copter!”

  Yawning, Joe followed Wing around the outside of the dome. The sun glanced across the world from behind the uplands east of Unity Base. A chill hung in the air after the long night.

  The angular hangar flanked a concrete landing pad, where a gaggle of people watched the helicopter’s final approach from the east. Long-bodied, robust, and military looking, the Starhawk slanted down toward its landing pad. The engines cut off, followed by the normal silence of Green, which sounded deafening in contrast to the machine.

  Becca Fisher dashed up to the helicopter to greet the pilot as he emerged from the cockpit. The main cabin door opened, a ramp flopped down to the ground, and a short, plump, grayheaded woman marched out. “Well, here we are, damn it all!” she announced. So that was the redoubtable Samantha Berry, Joe thought. Berry was followed by her team: two women and three men with arms full of gear. Joe wondered which of the men had gone astray yesterday.

  Fisher appeared at Joe’s elbow. “Ready for your ride?”

  Behind her, Joe could see a slender, long-winged aircraft parked inside the hangar. “No.”

  “You might want to think about it. You’ve got to get back upstairs one day.” Becca Fisher pointed at the sky.

  Joe handed the formal report on the new fever to Catharin. “You weren’t kidding when you said tomorrow,” was Catharin’s response. Then she put the flash wand away. They sat in her small, sparse office, cups of expedition coffee in front of them.

  Joe suddenly missed the taste and the quality of Kauai Blue Mountain coffee. Which was gone as everything else on Earth.

  “You can now forget about the flu,” Catharin said. “And work on something more important. Broken molecules.” She took another sip of her coffee. “Stasis weakened and broke protein molecules. I’m sure you understand why the stasis fever occurred later.”