Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  She was hitting so close to home that it hurt. He grated, “I don’t like you!”

  “The feeling is mutual!”

  Something thumped overhead and then made large scuffling sounds. Joe jumped, instantly aware of the alien world outside the dome.

  Catharin shouted at the ceiling, “No! Over by the door!”

  “What?”

  “It’s that damned leak.”

  “What leak?”

  “Don’t you notice anything that doesn’t interest you?” she said with sizzling contempt.

  A hatch in the ceiling swung open, and the bottom feet of a light ladder dropped to the floor. Down the ladder came a coveralled maintenance worker.

  “Did you find it?” she asked.

  He was the most unkempt Vanguarder Joe had seen yet, with a bad haircut and an ill-trimmed beard, and coveralls wet at the knees. “Yep, there’s water in the crawlspace up there.” Between two of the seams in the ceiling, a drop of water shivered and fell. It was a very inconspicuous leak. The maintenance worker stuck a hand out toward Joe. “Hi. Alvin Crawford—as in Crawford, Alabama. Nope, you’ve never heard of it.”

  “Did I see you earlier in the hangar, behind a welding torch?”

  “Yep! I’m the resident welder. As well as plumber and handy man and expedition mechanic too.”

  Catharin asked impatiently, “Is it the plumbing, or what?”

  “Oh, it’s plumbing, all right. Just a pipe taking a leak.” Crawford grinned at his own humor. “Not rainwater. Don’t worry about that.” He thoughtfully scratched his chin. “I might better shut the power down before getting in all that water. There’s electrical works up there. I’ll get to it tomorrow, and your people can take the day off.”

  Catharin said, “No, I don’t want to jeopardize the equipment in here by waiting that long.”

  “I guess I can patch it up tonight.” Crawford sounded exasperated.

  “That will have to do until you can repair it properly.”

  It dripped again.

  Joe enjoyed being a spectator for this little exchange.

  Catharin folded her arms, visibly packing up her frustration. Then she turned on Joe and said, in a tone with a vicious edge, “This is a cold front. It’s expected to blow through before sunrise, making tomorrow a lovely day for flying.”

  15 Kite

  Silverware and plates clattered, and the mess hall smelled of synthetic bacon and coffee. Through vents to the outside flowed fresh air with a cool edge that felt like early autumn morning.

  Plate in hand, Becca Fisher settled down across from Joe at the table. “Ready for your flight?”

  Joe shook his head. “I’ll pass.”

  “Last time around, you ended up as the filling in a titanium sandwich. But you can’t stay glued to the ground. You’ll want to go back to the Ship when quarantine ends.”

  “I thought you were the Ship’s engineer. What are you doing piloting a plane down here?”

  Fisher answered readily. “They revived the chief engineer. Orlov was originally supposed to bring the Ship in to planetfall, and he wasn’t happy that the job had been given to me. He decided to make my life unpleasant. He stuck me with the most obnoxious work he could find, and then criticized every detail of what I did with it.”

  Joe took an instant dislike to Orlov. “Authoritarian bastard, eh?”

  “I volunteered to do mapping duty down here. You know, in retrospect, I’m not too surprised that Chase got into trouble.”

  “Who?”

  “Your shuttle pilot on the way down. Jason ‘Chase’ Scanlan.” Twiddling her fork in synthetic scrambled eggs, she sounded sad. “His background was military, hot stuff jets that could power through most kinds of weather. It turns out that flying little stuff on Earth was better background for flying here. I’m used to tiptoeing around the weather, changing my plans, meeting nasty surprises in general. So I know how Chase could get into trouble like he did, and how I won’t.”

  Joe looked into his cup, which contained one last slosh of brown beverage and no inspiration for how he could evade the proposed flight. The idea of flying made breakfast sit uncomfortably in his stomach.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful morning. Calm air and not a cloud in the sky. So here’s my plan—”

  “Good morning.” Maya London claimed the place beside Joe. “How is your work? You’ve been frightfully busy for the last few days. We’re so glad you’re here working on our problems, aren’t we, Becky?”

  Distaste flickered across Fisher’s face as she swallowed whatever she had meant to say next.

  Maya fixed her whole attention on Joe as if Fisher had suddenly ceased to exist. “I’ve been hoping that you’d tell me all about what you do.”

  Fisher gathered her plate and utensils. “Bye.”

  Maya had glittering green eyes and long brown hair with auburn highlights, and a willful attractiveness that Joe sensed as tangibly as feeling wind or heat. The angler had gotten impatient, decided to set the hook in the fish’s mouth, he thought. Careless of her.

  “Later. I’ve got a date.” Joe hurried by the kitchen window to toss his dishes in. He caught up with Fisher before she was out of the mess hall and clapped a hand on her shoulder.

  After a startled moment, Fisher grinned brightly. “No time like the present, huh?”

  Joe glanced back toward Maya, verifying that she had seen the interchange. Vexation was written across Maya’s flawless features. Joe had successfully ruined Maya’s trophy-hunting morning. There was only one problem. Now he had to fly, and his shoulder ached to remind him what had happened last time.

  Joe helped Fisher wheel the slender airplane out of the hangar. She jauntily circled around, inspecting the plane, flexing the control surfaces on the trailing edges of the long, flimsy wings. “You aren’t talking much, but I can hear you thinking a mile a minute.”

  “No offense, but it doesn’t look like much of an airplane.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. The simpler a machine is, the less goes wrong with it. If making it back home is the most important thing, you don’t go wrong with long wings.”

  Joe pointed to a black shape painted on the fuselage, the silhouette of a long-winged bird. “Seagull?”

  “No. A kind of raptor called a kite. I call this plane Tennessee Kite. That’s a joke—there was a species of bird called Mississippi kite. Very good fliers.”

  Joe was not reassured.

  “Still want to go?”

  “No.” Joe was tense as an overwound spring. His shoulder hurt. “But I don’t like not wanting to.”

  “If you think you’d panic, then I don’t want you along. I couldn’t handle a panicky person as big as you are.”

  That sounded like a way out, but not one that Joe was cowardly enough to take. “I won’t panic. I’m a distance swimmer. I’ve swum in the open sea and Lake Superior. More than once, I came close to drowning in bad weather and rough waves. So I know what it feels like to be on the edge of panic. And how to pull back.”

  Satisfied, she lightly punched his upper arm. “That’s the right attitude. Hop in.”

  He clambered onto the root of the wing to reach the rim of the cockpit. Stepping in with one leg, then the other, he had to fold himself to get into the seat. The canopy almost brushed his hair when Fisher pulled it shut. Fisher gave him an amused look as he struggled to fasten his seat belt in the cramped space. A shooting pain in his shoulder objected. Go away, he told the pain. You aren’t real.

  Then she showed him how to use the voice-activated headset. “How do you hear me?”

  “Fine.”

  She started the propellers. The one on the plane’s nose whirred up to speed, followed by the rear prop, which was located between twin tail booms. Kite rolled down the packed-earth runway. Tension knotted Joe’s stomach so hard that it hurt.

  At the end of the runway, Fisher wheeled the plane around to face the whole length of the runway and the open sky. She gave Joe a significant gl
ance. He nodded with a lump the size of a baseball in his throat. This time Kite accelerated. Halfway to the other end, the vibration of contact with the runway let up. The ground below fell away, mountainside tumbling toward the lowlands. Joe gasped a curse.

  “Don’t look down.”

  Joe tore his eyes away from the falling green ground. Ahead of the plane, uplands rose on the horizon, beyond the front propeller which had dematerialized to a mere shimmer.

  Then the sound background changed. Joe twisted around to stare in horror at the back prop, which circled idly.

  “I shut it down. The back prop’s only for takeoffs, or when I need extra power. There’s safety in redundancy,” Fisher told him.

  Beyond the bubble cockpit and the tail fins, the flat mountaintop tilted. “You’re turning?”

  “Only a little. We took off into the wind. Now I’m heading around toward the sea.” Her fingers ran lightly over the instrument panel. “I’ll be doing some photo-mapping. It’s too good a morning not to. Later it’ll be a different story. The days on Green are so long that heat and cloud buildup are pretty extreme in midday. By then, we’ll be long since back in the Base.”

  “So you worry about weather?”

  “I wouldn’t say worry. I’m careful.”

  “Green has mild weather,” Joe said. “Not my opinion. Chase’s.”

  She shook her head sharply. “This is a dark world. Not just a dark continent, like Africa when the first pilots flew into it with a compass and a radio and that was it for instruments. Green is a whole dark world. Unknown to us. We can’t afford to think we understand it.” She looked out at the nameless hills and shore. “I grew up in the country. Land does have personality, it has temperament. And I’m telling you, I’ve never met any green land that feels remotely like this place does. Or acts like this ground does,” she added in a low voice.

  The day after the crash, a search party had found the battered body of Chase Scanlan. Wing had left Scanlan respectfully laid out under the ersatz pall of a fern frond. They found the body twenty feet away, sprawled like a discarded rag doll. After the initial shock, Wing had been able to explain what happened. Halfway up Unity Mountain, Joe and Wing had seen busy insectlike undertakers bury a crushed slug. Apparently the ground in the fern forest had similarly embraced Scanlan. And subsequently rejected him because his alien flesh tasted bad.

  “The scenery starts changing about here.”

  Hills and humps of the land flattened out. Featureless green was broken by sinuous channels and brief sheets of flat water. Nothing particularly upsetting had happened since takeoff, and Joe began to be interested in the land. “That looks like an antique map of Frisia I once studied. The water all the same shade of blue and the land all the same shade of green, interlaced with each other.”

  “Yeah, but what’s Frisia?”

  “The marshland sea coast of Holland and North Germany. My mother’s parents were from Frisia. They named her Silke.”

  “Zeelkeh?”

  “It’s a Frisian name, and it means a Selkie. A mythical creature. A human who turns into a seal.”

  “Seal people? I think Ireland had that legend too. My ancestors came from Ireland, mostly.” She had loosened up, but her hands did not leave the controls. “That’s how I got my red hair and fair skin.”

  “I have Frisian looks. Black hair and blue eyes, like my mother’s father.”

  Fisher gave him a sidewise look that appraised and, Joe thought, appreciated his appearance. “Dramatic combination.”

  He hadn’t thought about Frisia, or his grandparents, or his mother, since he came out of stasis. Memories had been on ice.

  “Joe?”

  “Frisia drowned when the Greenhouse effect raised the North Sea, so my mother’s parents immigrated to Canada.”

  “My ancestors got out of Ireland in the Potato Famine. That’s history, isn’t it? From old worlds to new.”

  On the oceanic horizon toward the east, the rising sun lay in a bath of yellow brilliance. Channels and sheets of water in the marshes reflected gold. Joe shifted in his seat to better see the frilled and gilded edge of the sea, but Kite’s long wing was in his way.

  “I can lower that wing,” Becca offered.

  “Ugh—go ahead.” He braced himself.

  The wing on his side dipped. The plane turned away from the sun. Marsh bunched up into lowlands with Unity Mountain off to the west, and then the plane’s nose tracked the course of a river that flowed toward the sea and the gold-inlaid marsh. More than a full circle from where she’d started, Becca straightened the plane and flew northward toward the river.

  “This is as far as we go. This is one kite that’s definitely on a string.” With a slight movement of Becca’s hands on the control stick, the plane banked and Kite flew inland above the river.

  Joe wanted to swim. The river below Kite’s wings was wide and would have been his kind of distance across, but God only knew what was in the water on this world.

  Becca said, “Technically, I’m out of bounds, flying above the river. It’s one of the limits of my mapping area. But I figure it’s worth a mapping pass. And I have plenty of altitude. If we lost both engines and Kite turned into a glider, that’d be okay, because it has a high glide ratio, and I scoped out some nice flat emergency landing sites—and that’s if I couldn’t catch some thermal lift to make it back to Unity Base.”

  “So you don’t mind breaking rules about how far to go.”

  “I don’t blow the rules to bits. I bend ‘em, when I know I know what I’m doing.”

  “Didn’t you recently map Planet Blue?”

  She laughed. “You saw that image? Oops. Yeah. I did a seventy-degree bank just for fun. Without remembering to turn off the mapping cameras. And the moon happened to be in the sky.”

  “I like your style.”

  She smiled at him. Inside smile lines, the edges of her lips were as finely defined as the rim of a porcelain cup. “Hear that?” A soft, regular beeping sounded on the airplane’s instrument panel. “It’s the beacon at Unity Base. We’re coming home.”

  Where a tributary from Unity Mountain met the river, Becca turned to follow the tributary. Unity Mountain lay dead ahead. “One more hurdle to go, Joe. Prepare for landing.”

  The reminder jarred Joe. In this morning sun, the mountain’s bare dirt crown looked like ordinary reddish dirt, not a wound. But Joe’s shoulder hurt at the sight of it and the thought of the tangled fern forest on its flanks, and the dead man rejected by the soil. Joe sweated. He had a death grip with both hands on his belt’s webbing.

  Kite angled across the mountain’s flank, then banked back toward the runway. The plane descended with a slowness that made Joe’s skin crawl. He could make out individual furry pines on the rim of the mountain.

  Kite fluttered in the air, slip-sliding left and right. Joe choked off a startled cry.

  “Just a little air turbulence. It’s okay, Joe!”

  Joe felt the wheels touch the runway with an almost imperceptible bump. Becca steered the plane toward the hangar and brought it to a stop. She grinned brilliantly. “That was one of my better landings.”

  Joe’s clothes were damp with cool sweat. “That was a hell of a lot better than my last landing. Thanks.”

  She extended her hand to shake Joe’s with wiry fingers and a strong grip. “Congratulations!”

  Joe felt the way he always had after a hard swim across a difficult body of water: victorious.

  16 New Moon

  go north about 70 meters. find tree marked with x.

  Catharin took a compass heading and decided that the dimpled crown of a distant hill would serve as her guidepost. She walked that way, counting her steps. Seventy steps at an estimated meter per step, which for her at a brisk pace was reasonable, should get her to the marked tree. The fern trees grew widely spaced enough to make her trail veer only slightly from beeline-true.

  The moon was invisible above the cloudy sky, in its new phase, throwing
no reflected light on Green. But did Catharin’s body nonetheless somehow know Blue was there? Did it still affect her brain? Because those questions had to be answered, she had the task of finding her way through the fern forest. It was an important test, because the team at Unity Base could avoid moonlight if it addled their brains. They could not avoid the moon’s very existence.

  With the solidly overcast sky, the sun offered no clues as to east and west. But the bulk of Unity Mountain, visible above the trees, was a very large and telltale clue. The land here gently sloped down from the direction of Unity Mountain.

  An unusually large, multiple fern tree blocked her way, at least five stems growing up in one cluster. She stopped counting steps to work her way around the obstacle, called the diameter of the quintuplet tree ten steps, and double-checked the compass heading. Catharin looked up from the compass to see the dimpled hill in the distance and a purple pond right in front of her.

  Purple pond? The instructions and sketched map indicated no ponds, purple or otherwise. She was lost. Feeling her face flush with dismay, she checked her watch. 1515 a.m. She had a little time left before she would be late to the field camp. She sat down on a clean rock to review how she’d gotten here, desperate to understand what she’d done wrong.

  The same test for a score of different people had been conducted across the long, cloudy Green-day. No one had flunked yet. Even Alvin Crawford, according to the report called into the base by Sam, had sauntered out of the forest in good time.

  But Alvin wasn’t an astronaut who had been twice frozen in stasis.

  When her turn came, Wing had driven Catharin along a rough track into the wilderness. Wing dropped her off equipped with canteen, two-way, compass, and instructions, which she’d followed to the letter: a series of compass bearings and distances.

  Losing time by the minute, she sketched the sequence of directions and distances on the back of the instruction sheet. The resulting erratic path ought to end up not far from where it started. So why the purple pond? She hated being lost, not knowing which way to go and losing precious time by the second. Near despair, she wondered if the directions had been designed to fail, to test intelligence in a less than straightforward way.