by C. Gockel
“Our immune systems got busy cleaning up the broken pieces.”
“Right. They needed help, though, and got it.”
“I remember being sauced with medicines after stasis.”
She frowned. “You shouldn’t be able to recall that. People are in the twilight phase, still deeply unconscious, during revival therapy.”
But he did remember his body manipulated, sampled, and injected by machines. He had been utterly helpless to protest or move. All he could do was be mutely aware that change was being imposed on him without regard for his will, and he had hated it.
Something brushed Joe’s leg, breaking his bleak reverie. To his surprise, he found a small calico cat twining around his ankles. It meowed up at him.
“You were treated with artificial cleanup enzymes and catalytic antibodies. Nunki!” She snapped her fingers. The cat leaped into her lap.
“Did it include skin rejuvenation therapy?”
“Yes. Without it we’d have woken up looking old.”
Joe remembered his first morning after stasis. He’d looked at himself in the restroom mirror with trepidation. To his relief, his hair was still black, eyes clear, skin unravaged. At that moment, he had thought about women, lovers, with a cold shock, as he realized that all of the lovers he had ever known were dust now, scattered atoms on a distant Earth. Then, alone in the first hour of that first gray morning, he had cried.
“Besides collagen, the revival therapy cleaned up fragments of insulin and other vital proteins like hemoglobin.” Catharin rattled on about the molecular specifics of the therapy.
Finally he interrupted. “No stone left unturned.”
“We were prepared to clean up the organism at the molecular level, and tide it over until new intact molecules of these vital proteins could be manufactured in the cells. But we got heavy breakages where we weren’t expecting it—weren’t ready for it.” She hugged the cat.
“Isn’t it unsanitary to let that cat in Medical?”
“She isn’t allowed in the infirmary or the lab, just the offices.” In other words, the doctor made a loophole in the rules because she liked cats. “We need you to design additional cleanup molecules.”
“I don’t make molecules,” he said. “I make life-forms.”
“You should be bright enough to catch onto molecules, if you feel as well as you claim,” she retorted.
“I feel fine. Give me a challenge.”
“Catalytic antibodies for the damaged proteins of the muscles. Actin and myocin, the muscle globins. People are suffering from muscular pain and wasting. Study up on it. Make some catalytic antibodies and make them work,” she said with finality. “That will demonstrate how fit you are, or are not.”
Joe hadn’t studied stasis since early in graduate school, hadn’t worked on catalytic antibodies at all. But he had help in a big way.
For two decades of professional life, he had enjoyed, and taken for granted, unlimited access to electronically libraried information and human technical assistance, as well as supercomputing and artificial and virtual intelligence. The Ship had all of the above. Moreover, it was all startlingly responsive to his slightest analytic whim, like a tremendous genie hovering over his shoulder. Any factual observation or question on his part provoked a torrent of informed response, relevant statistics, opinions from various specialists. The whole Ship with its computing power, researchers, and all, was focused on the expedition Downside. It was the old Mission Control model of doing space business. It soon unnerved Joe. Earth’s Net had been many orders of magnitude more complicated and rewarding, but the Net had been like an ocean Joe could jump into or step out of at his whim. The ship-genie in the sky tended to interrupt what he was doing.
The telcon said 2000 a.m. Dividing by two put it at ten a.m.—and except for the fact that he had been working for six solid hours, the day really did look like midmorning, with fresh sunlight filtering in through the translucent material of the dome overhead. Seized by restlessness, Joe dismissed the genie in the sky and left the dome.
Once outdoors, he realized how unquiet the Medical section had been. Machines continuously whispered and whirred, and Catharin or Eddy talked and handled laboratory instruments. Out here, there were no sounds. Not the commotion of a city, not the bird and bug noises of a park. Clouds dotted the eastern half of the sky. The cloudlets drifted westward, pushed by winds at a high altitude.
Then Joe heard a faint clamor. The knotted thread of sound led him toward the aircraft hangar. The hangar’s roof doubled as the base solar energy collector, with panes turned toward the ascendant sun. The hangar doors stood open, pushed to either side on their tracks.
Recorded music with a rapid percussive beat echoed off the hangar walls. The helicopter hunkered in one of two large bays, with the cowlings peeled off the engine under one rotor and the copter pilot balanced on a ladder as he operated on the engine. His tools made thunking and clinking noises. In the back of the hangar, a bright welding flare hissed, wielded by somebody in dark coveralls and a face mask that reflected the flame’s glare.
The welder did not look up from his work, but the pilot noticed Joe, came down the ladder in one limber motion, and walked over to him. A compact man with brown hair and blue eyes, the copter pilot wiped his hand with a clean rag before extending it to Joe. “Domino Cady,” he said.
“Joe Toronto.” The surname still seemed strange to Joe, but at least he no longer caught himself halfway through “Devreze.”
“Bon jour, mon cousin! I’m from Acadia, in Louisiana, where the French who were thrown out of Canada ended up.” Cady had the regional accent, a slight lilt to his words. Plus an engaging smile and a casual, cocky manner.
Women would like Cady, Joe thought, with a flicker of competitive interest. “Cajun, eh? Any alligators in your personal effects?”
Cady laughed. “I didn’t bring reptiles from home with me, just some spices and music. I ought to warn you, people who wander in here get an earful of Zydeco music and put to work on the copter.”
Becca Fisher popped out of the helicopter’s cockpit. “Worse than that, you might get taken up into the air. Not today. The weather’s turning bad. But soon, right?” Grinning, she brandished a tool at Joe.
“It’s nearly 2200 a.m.,” Catharin said. “Why don’t you quit for the day?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
The doctor sat down with a sigh. “I knew this would happen if I let you out. Don’t you have anything between zero and full throttle?”
She’d been up and about since before he was. “Don’t you?”
“I’m fit. You’re not. Studying stasis therapy?” Over his shoulder, she looked at the screen. “You’re a quick study, all right. But now’s a good time to take a break.”
“Why?”
The screen told him. It went blank. The Ship had gone behind the planet, and with that the telcon link was severed. “That’s the third time today,” Joe growled.
“Withdrawal failed to break the addiction?” she asked dryly.
“Here, the telcon’s the lifeline of what’s left of civilization.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of civilization.” The corners of her lips quirked.
“Touché,” said Joe.
At that point Eddy brought in a tray laden with cups and pale yellow cookies.
Catharin smiled at Eddy. “I thought we’d run out of cookies since the quarantine.”
“The Ship dropped supplies. Including cookies. With the quartermaster’s compliments,” said Eddy.
Joe took a bite of cookie. Synthetic, from the Ship’s food factories, approximate chocolate and nut. “Plants everywhere and you can’t eat any of ‘em,” he said. “It’d be rough to get stuck down here without the Ship to drop supplies.”
“It would be fatal,” said Catharin. She asked Eddy, “How is the mood running today?”
“People have decided that Fredrik was cracked all along, and not a nice man, either. But three problems all in o
ne day are too many to brush off, even if some of them happen to people who aren’t well liked,” Eddy said seriously. “People are nervous that it’s catching.”
“No,” said Catharin. “Environmental agent.”
“Such as?” said Joe. “My committee’s report covered that ground. Not only are there no microbes that might get us, there’s damn little in the way of chemicals, radioactivity, heavy metals.”
“You missed one. It’s the moon,” said Catharin.
Eddy gave her a surprised look. She said, “On Earth, the moon had definite tidal effects, and was blamed for psychological ones. That’s how we got the words ‘lunatic’ and ‘moonstruck.’“
“Oh!”
“That’s superstitious bilge,” said Joe.
Catharin countered, “Emergency rooms beefed up their staff for the full moon even in the twentyfirst century.”
“And that’s anecdotal. Let’s talk science, shall we?”
“Sure. Blue’s mass far exceeds that of Luna while the distance between Green and Blue is almost the same as that between Earth and Luna. Blue pulls the sea and other bodies of water. Our brains are bags of liquid, you know.”
“A few ounces of water doesn’t have tides. It takes a hell of a mass of water to register tidal effects. The moon raised the level of Lake Superior a whole three inches at high tide.”
“Unlike Luna, Blue has a magnetosphere.” She had her arms crossed. “Green actually runs through it sometimes. Thus the auroral display.”
“Charged particles are funneled to the poles. They don’t rain down on us here. No, if we’ve got psychological problems, they’ll be in the nature of molecular psychology, and fixable, unlike the moon.”
He had taken pains to trample her turf, and she was clearly vexed. “I didn’t say the moon was an unfixable problem,” she snapped. “It’s there. We can cope with its effects.”
“Which are negligible if they exist at all.”
“That wasn’t what you said about your walk up the mountain. You reported major perceptual disorientation.”
“I was sick. Sick people imagine things.”
“Too true, and if I were you I’d rather it be the moon than stasis aftereffects causing my mind to slip gears,” she said curtly.
Joe bristled. “I thought you had stasis effects figured out. Not sure?”
“Its effects on the human body, yes, I can tell you that, in excruciating detail.” She sounded cold. “Its consequences for the brain—that I do not know. Human beings have big, complicated brains that have been wavering on the brink of instability since CroMagnon times. The bigger, the brighter, the more complex, the more unstable. I advise you not to forget that.”
Eddy seemed to be finding the exchange entertaining. Joe belatedly realized that he was not up to a prolonged fight. He felt tired, with a burning knot of pain in his neck. “When do we get the Ship back?” he asked, putting down his cup.
“Not for another two hours.”
“I need a break.”
Joe retreated to the Penthouse, where Wing was relaxing on his cot. “That woman is an icicle,” Joe announced. “Long, thin, and cold.”
Wing chuckled. “If you want a warm reception, cultivate your acquaintance with Maya. She polished her wiles for a week before your arrival.”
“Trophy hunter?”
“All the way.”
Joe gritted his teeth. He wasn’t anyone’s trophy. “She’s not my favorite woman around here.”
“Ah. Who is?”
“Fisher. She’s no beauty, but she’s worth talking to.”
“You might look more closely at her. She’s made like porcelain. Fine and strong, like bone china that takes a great burden without cracking, a blow without breaking,” Wing said.
Joe had to smile. “She’s your favorite too?”
“Yes, but today, I am in love with Samantha Berry.”
“The old warhorse? Why?”
“Sam feels inclined to let me join the survey team. I’m not really qualified, according to the high standards for that group, but Sam told Manhattan, ‘I want somebody with less credentials and more common sense!’“
Joe remembered the walk up the mountain. Wing had sense, all right, and didn’t lose it in a strange natural environment. Joe nodded.
Joe’s cot looked more inviting than it had for days. He really was tired, more so than he should have been after an easy day with a long night’s sleep before that. While confined to the Penthouse, he and Wing had fallen into ragged sleeping patterns, sleeping a lot through the planet’s twenty-sixhour night, relatively little through the equally long day. So he’d gotten plenty of rest. But he still felt achy. And pain deep in his shoulder reached all the way to his neck.
A strangely familiar sound impinged on Joe’s awareness. Wing hopped up and opened the door. Outside it was raining. A gust of cold damp air brought in with it the smell of rain-damp dirt. Wing watched it rain for a while. “My grandmother said it’s good luck if it rains when your life is changing. Maybe I’ll get onto the team. I want to see more of this world for myself.”
To Joe, looking past Wing, the ground looked bloody where the rain spattered it.
The rain kept up, cold and heavy, turned the ground into red streams. Joe’s nap turned into sleep—the night’s sleep after the day’s work, but this was Green with its long days, so it was light outside. When Joe got up, it felt like rising from a stultifying afternoon nap.
Catharin had set up a virtual lab notebook for their joint use. In it, he began to sketch novel molecules, seeking an antibody to bind with the wreckage of muscle myocin.
Joe stopped to rub the unwelcome stiffness in his neck. The more he thought about his discomfort, the odder it seemed—not just a pain, but a sense of localized fever running from his hurt shoulder up into his neck. Like a spreading fever sending tendrils up toward his brain. Joe felt a chill of alarm. He should ask Catharin about this.
But maybe he was hypochondriac. Like Hoffmann. And Hoffmann was not what Joe wanted to be like. Joe gritted his teeth. He wouldn’t mention phantom pains after all.
But he could almost feel the tendrils of pain exploring for a way into his skull. Joe looked for and located a link to Catharin’s medical records in the virtual lab notebook. The security was more elaborate than Joe would have expected in a lab populated by few and honest researchers—but it was nothing he couldn’t outwit.
Entering Catharin’s medical records database, Joe found the records that pertained to him. He took a morbid interest in the details of cracked bone, various contusions and abrasions that Catharin had found on his body. Then there were speculations about his psychological state: The patient is uncooperative and irritable. A not-so-clinical note: He was like this during his assessment interview. Arrogance and irritability, however uncalled-for, are normal for him. Joe stared at the words. As a matter of fact, he was feeling irritable right now.
Something rubbed against his ankles. Startled, he realized that the little cat had gotten into the lab. He reached down to offer it his fingertips to sniff. “You aren’t supposed to be in here, you know.” He patted the cat’s back, prompting an audible purr. Joe invitingly scratched the fabric of his pants over his knee. The cat jumped into his lap.
Joe backed out of Catharin’s records, using one hand to key in commands while he petted her cat with the other. Emitting a loud purr, the creature quivered with pleasure. It was a nice little cat, natural-acting, blithely unaware of its long journey in the form of a clump of eight cells vitrified and frozen. “Do you know your mama is a self-righteous witch?” he murmured.
Nunki kneaded her claws. Joe picked the cat up, detaching her claws from his clothes. He held her up to his face, putting the soft fur and purr against his cheek.
Then Joe noticed Catharin, in the doorway, silently watching him. She wasn’t wearing the Mask—but her unguarded expression was hard to figure out, a downward curve of the edges of her mouth, maybe annoyance that he was making friends with her
cat. “What do you want?”
“The telcon,” she said. Joe reluctantly stood up, placing the cat in the chair. “Nunki.” Catharin pointed a finger at its nose. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here.” The cat skittered out.
Catharin and Eddy had apparently gotten some blood out of Hoffmann, against his objections. “We needed the help of several of the men in the Base,” she explained with grim distaste. She wanted to transmit blood analysis data to the Ship.
Her plan was foiled by a telcon blackout. She had run just a little too late. She shook her head with a tight frown.
“What about the satellite?” Joe asked.
“Ejected today. It’ll be positioned by tomorrow.”
He didn’t bother to ask if she meant tomorrow sun, or tomorrow by the clock. “Must be nice to have friends in high places.”
She resorted to the lab’s blood analysis program. Joe watched. He idly tried to calibrate her age, comparing her to researchers he’d known. He decided that she was closer to thirty than forty, younger than he’d thought: uncharacteristically unobservant of him to take so long figuring it out. “You must have been pretty young when you made the astronaut corps.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“That and what, PhD plus MD? Hyperachiever?”
“That could be said of most of us,” she replied.
He casually leaned back in the chair. “Ever let your hair down, Doctor?”
“When it’s appropriate to do so,” she said absently.
“Inhibitions, eh?”
Wheeling around, she shot back, “Fine!” She took in a sharp breath. “Now what makes you tick?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Why did you come? Not for altruism. I know that. On Earth, you had everything. You were a crown prince of science. You had the world, not just a starship, for a showcase. Why leave? You don’t make sense, and I don’t like that.”