Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  But that would have been exceedingly unfair.

  A flash of motion over the pond distracted her. Something winged and quick, the size of a small bird or a large butterfly, hovered over the pond, occasionally glancing the water’s iridescent purple surface.

  With her attention distracted by the flying thing, her subconscious succeeded in raising a pertinent question. Isn’t the sea east of the mountain?

  Of course it was. But the mountain itself lay to the east of this part of the fern forest. Catharin had grown up on the East Coast of North America, and had gone to Girl Scout camp where the hills sloped to the sea. That fact, engraved in her mind at an early age, must have been more indelible than she’d realized, and it took the not-always-helpful form of east is down. One of the today’s instructions had said go east. . . . And she’d automatically selected a tall fern directly downslope and walked toward it. That had happened just before she had more accurately turned northward to seek the X-marked tree.

  Catharin sketched her real route on the back of the instructions. The X-marked tree could not be far away: 50 steps past the pond and then off to the right another 160 steps should put her there. She sprang up and circled the purple pond.

  Something touched her shoulder. She turned her head to discover the thing that had hovered over the pond perched there. It clung to her shirt with at least six jointed legs.

  “Ugh—go away!” She twitched her shoulder. The creature just flexed its fan-folded wings, one of which briefly brushed her neck, and hunkered down.

  If it didn’t take off on its own, she wasn’t going to touch it, possibly prompting it to sting. Unwanted passenger and all, Catharin hurried along. She almost panicked when she did not see a mark on the likeliest ginkoid tree, then remembered to circle around its trunk. There the X-shaped mark waited to greet anyone who came the right way. Catharin vented a sharp sigh of relief. People made that kind of mistake all the time on Earth, swapping east for west or left for right. The human mind had always tripped over its own bright nimble feet.

  The bug, still aboard, unfolded its wings into two fans. And then closed them again. “Big mistake,” Catharin muttered. “Someone I know will just love to introduce you to her collection.”

  Apart from the fact that several males lounged in the shade, the field camp definitely reminded Catharin of Girl Scout camp, complete with Samantha Berry playing scoutmaster. “Look, everybody, there’s Catharin, just in time!” Sam announced.

  “Sam, look at this thing on my shoulder.”

  Sam trotted over. “Where did you find that critter?”

  Catharin decided not to mention her purple pond detour in public. She would tell Sam later and privately. “It found me, by landing on me while I was looking for the seventh checkpoint.” Eddy came over to have a look. Joe was stretched out in the shade, apparently napping, and Alvin had a two-way pressed against his ear, talking to Unity Base.

  “Becca, hand me one of those screened collecting jars,” said Sam. “It’s the closest thing to a dragonfly I’ve seen so far, even with eight legs and purple feet.”

  Catharin tensed while Sam expertly flicked the thing into the collecting jar. Relieved, Catharin sat down in a folding chair in the fern tree shade with a cold, welcome, peach-flavored drink.

  Becca sat down beside her. “You had us a little worried.”

  “This is the damnedest ecosphere,” said Sam, studying the purple-footed bug. “If it is a dragonfly-analogue, I’d expect the things that Earth had at the same time. Amphibians and giant cockroaches. You didn’t observe it eat anything, did you?”

  “It didn’t sample doctors,” Catharin replied, peering under her shirt collar to check for broken skin on her shoulder. “Or textiles,” she added, finding no holes in the shirt.

  “So why no cockroaches?” Joe asked. He was awake after all.

  “I’d guess it’s the moon. Or the lack of one, before the seamoon eventually rolled out of the cosmic crapshoot and stayed here. My guess is that life has been trying to make a go of it on Green for billions of years. But seasonal irregularities and the occasional climatic upheaval set it back. Again and again and again, mass extinctions.” Catharin remembered Lary’s model, ages ago at the bright sun and world with no moon. Like scraping a painting off a canvas. “Every time around, a few more of the more highly evolved species manage to survive. But the upshot is impoverishment of animal life.”

  “But now the moon’s here,” said Joe.

  “And so are we, and this is a perfect laboratory for planetology and evolutionary studies, and I want some more data,” said Sam. “It’s time to launch the boat. Everybody’s passed our little field test. If we stay out of moonlight, we’ll be safe. Right?”

  Catharin compressed her lips, thinking about the purple pond. But she had quickly and accurately figured out her mistake, one that could have easily happened on Earth. “Yes—pending experience to the contrary.”

  “Ever christened a vessel?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  Joe sat up. “What, a sailboat?”

  Aware that she hardly cut an elegant figure today, hot and sweaty in field clothing, Catharin corrected his misimpression. “US Navy destroyer.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “The Navy always looks—looked—for the most noteworthy woman they can find who has any connection to the new ship. I’d just been tapped for the Astronaut Corps, and I’m related to Rear Admiral Hardin Tucker. So I was asked to christen the warship of that name.”

  “She had a flowing blue silk dress, and with her height, she was stunning,” Becca informed Joe. “She fit right in with all the navy crisp white cotton and gold braid.”

  “Do you want me to christen your boat, Sam?”

  “Hang on. I’ve just about got the votes counted,” said Alvin.

  “Votes?”

  Becca explained. “For the one who’s going to christen Sam’s boat, you’re in a three-way race with Maya and Eddy—he was nominated by Joe and is getting the sympathy vote from people who want to break tradition and let it be a male.”

  Amazed, Catharin wondered if remote scientific bases on Earth had been like this, with enough monotony and free time for people to resort to such low-level amusements. Not so on space stations and ships, starting with ancient Mir and ending with Aeon. In space habitats, there was too much checking of equipment, changing of filters, cleaning mold out of the life-support system, ad infinitum, for idle hands to be much of a problem. In space, you had too much to do just keeping your environment glued together.

  Alvin riffled a bunch of little slips of paper in his hand. “Aaron called in the count from the Base, and I’ve tabulated ‘em with the ones here.”

  “Don’t I get a vote?” Catharin asked.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. You’re it by a good margin.”

  “Thank you, I think,” said Catharin.

  This wasn’t such a bad deal, Catharin thought. She was getting a hop in Domino Cady’s Starhawk in return for christening the boat. Headset on and sitting in the copilot’s seat, she watched Unity Base diminish as the Starhawk lifted up from it. The rotors throbbed powerfully. With its heavy-duty hoist, the copter lugged the riverboat. The game plan was to put the boat in the river, and then christen it properly, with its keel wet.

  Domino leveled the copter and made for Camp Darwin. Catharin relaxed. She had flown with Domino before, on Earth, when he was Becca’s friend and aspiring Vanguarder, and he was a superb pilot. And a safety-minded one.

  From the passenger cabin, Samantha Berry stuck her head into the cockpit. She pointed to the large brown bottle cradled in Catharin’s lap. “So what is it? Water? I know we don’t have that much drinkable alcohol, and if we did, I’d rather toast the boat with it than let it run into the river.”

  “I told you I’d do this right, and I will, and you’ll see,” said Catharin. “It’s not alcohol, and it’s not water.”

  Domino was concentrating on
piloting the Starhawk, but he evidently had enough spare attention to follow the conversation. “But it’s like baptizing. You can’t just use anything!”

  “You are aware that christening a vessel is an ancient offering to propitiate the gods?” Sam pointed out. “Or more to the point here, the goddess.”

  “What goddess?” Catharin asked.

  “The moon. Haven’t you ever heard of the moon goddess?”

  Domino gave Sam a shocked look. He was Old Catholic. Sam was pagan. And they were quite welcome to sort through their theological differences without her, Catharin thought. She saw Camp Darwin ahead, where the river had hollowed a placid backwater out of the mountain’s heels. The surrounding land lay in gentle heights and valleys like a ruffled green rug.

  A small crowd of people awaited the Starhawk and its burden. Hovering, the Starhawk lowered the boat into the tributary with a lively splash. “We want to baptize it, not drown it!” Sam yelled from the cabin, where she’d strapped herself back in for the landing.

  Domino released the cable from the hoist and landed the Starhawk in a clearing beside Camp Darwin. He silenced the machine and quickly moved to the cabin door to let down the steps. Domino had old-fashioned religious ideas, but manners to match. He gallantly handed Catharin out with her brown bottle and its mystery contents.

  Alvin had provided the baptismal liquid from his inventory of used and useless machine fluids. He grinned from his vantage point on the leading edge of the crowd that straggled after Catharin to the edge of the water, where some of Sam’s team had secured the boat to a small metal dock.

  “I christen thee—” Giving the bottle a wide swing, Catharin called out, “Beagle!” and smashed the bottle on the boat’s prow. Rivulets of bright blue liquid ran down the hull into the water. After a moment of startled silence, everybody clapped.

  “Antifreeze,” Alvin explained smugly. “The doctor wanted something that wouldn’t have a lot of Earth germs in it to contaminate the river.”Thick blue rivulets streaked Beagle’s blunt bow. “Well, that should get the goddess’ attention,” said Sam.

  17 Field Day

  Under gray skies, a trio of jeeps loaded with people and gear caravanned down Mount Unity for a work day at Camp Darwin. Feeling cooped up and restless, Joe went along.

  The road ran arrowstraight to the edge of the mountain and through the belt of furry pines. Gray skies made the trees’ bluish tinge even more pronounced than usual. The furry pines looked unreal. Once out of the pines, the jeeps chugged along through bushy thickets, soft and rubbery, almost as blue as the furry pines. “All this greenery isn’t the right shade of green,” Joe told Wing.

  “It’s right for this world. The sun is slightly redder than Sol, so the leaves of all plants, not just the conifers, are bluish, to take best advantage of the light.”

  The driver struggled with shifting the vehicle’s gears in a washout. The other passengers whooped. Joe crossed his arms, all the jollity getting on his nerves. Finally, the jeeps pulled up beside a wide gray stream. Three grubby tents comprised the satellite base, known as Camp Darwin.

  The Vanguarders piled out and trooped to the metal dock and boat at the water’s edge. Beagle was a short, stubby boat with an enclosed cabin and a thick glass window in the bottom, a portal onto a new world below the water. It reminded Joe of a child’s bathtub toy.

  The task of the day was to install instruments for an upcoming float test. Like a scout troop on an outing, everybody was orchestrated. Maya London took a few minutes to flirt with Joe, but she had her job too, and Joe didn’t care to help her. When Maya wasn’t looking, Joe walked away from the party.

  The Vanguard had worked together for years before the ship left Earth. Team players. A team used to winning. Here the team had no opposition. The world was soft and mild.

  Joe walked downstream to the peninsula between tributary and river. The river wound out of the northwest, toward the sea, wide and shallow, water dark and gray as slate. Rains upstream had swollen the river. Joe scowled at the wide water. He felt a compelling need to swim, to work out the gloom that ate at his guts like acid. He picked up a stone out of the debris piled by the water.

  Hurling sticks and stones, Joe found that the gravity of Green—marginally less than that of Earth—made it just possible for him to hit the far bank on his better throws. His misses splashed and bobbed away downstream.

  Except for one. The stick splashed, bobbed as usual, and proceeded downstream. In front of it, then, the gray water crinkled: a tiny swell extended all the way across the river and even had a little fringe of foam on top. The stick spun and went under, to surface a good two meters upstream. And it continued to move in that direction: upstream. Crouched on the bank, Joe stared at the water. It looked a trifle higher on both banks, as if the river had risen a few inches, all at once and from downstream up. The rise had swept away one of his sticks lying just by the water.

  Across the silent distance to Camp Darwin came a splash and burst of laughter. Joe glared back toward the camp, clapping a hand to his neck because of a twinge that made it hard to turn his head. The feelers of pain radiating from his shoulder felt hard and stiff, relentlessly pulling on the skull. Joe struck his forehead with his palm, wishing that he could knock the hypochondriac, brooding thoughts out of his mind. But exercise was the only way to do that.

  Unity Mountain rose up over him, old, bare in places, not very high by Earth standards. He had walked up it once before. Starting farther up, but badly hurt at the time, he had still made it in a couple of hours.

  Unnoticed, he followed the road back uphill.

  In fifteen minutes, he worked up a sweat. Joe wondered about the season. The night they crashed had felt temperate, not too hot or cold. His memory went hazy for the weeks that followed, while he lay in the cot with his cracked shoulder bone and a serious relapse of stasis fever, a sick stupor. Later, there were long warm intervals that weren’t fever but rather climatic heat, like a late summer afternoon, when air-conditioning blown in from the dome countered the heat but did not obliterate it. That must have been high summer.

  Summer had now dissolved into rainy cold fronts. There had been no howling, crashing storms, just gray rain that fell and leached the green out of the frondy vegetation.

  Maybe he hated this world. Hated the insipidness of it. No animals. Just soft bluegreen plants. He scrambled cross-country between switchbacks, bruising blue-green leaves and trampling soft molds on the ground in the process, pushing a body that had gotten shockingly out of condition. When he reached the Base, his leg muscles quivered. But his mood had improved.

  Entering the dome, the door of which stood wide open, Joe approved of the desertion of it. Almost everybody was at the river.

  He entered the break room in Medical with no particular noise, and so did not disturb Catharin. Lying on the couch, prone, she had her head buried in her arms, with the little cat curled up on the small of her back asleep. Catharin seemed to be sleeping as well.

  She wore the usual clothes, tan slacks and shirt, but they fit well over the long slight curves of her body. Joe restrained an urge to run his hand down her side and find out if she felt as inviting as she looked. She would awaken as soon as he touched her. And likely slap him.

  Joe opened the refrigerator and took out a can of kiwi-flavored beverage with a slight inadvertent rattle.

  Even asleep, Catharin’s nerves must have been strung tight. She jumped, which sent the cat bounding away. “Where have you been?”

  “None of your business.”

  “They’re looking for you at the river!”

  “Won’t find me there.” He opened the beverage with a snap. “Walked back.”

  She gasped. “Are you out of your mind? It totally violates the rules for anyone to go off on their own!”

  He cursed the rules with so much venom that she backed off. She held up her hands. “Okay. Just tell someone next time. And speaking of that, why don’t you call Aaron at the river, and tell him
he can call off the search for you?”

  Today was Sunday on the Ship. Apart from a skeleton crew of two lowly technicians, his staff in the research center up there had not reported for work, without asking for his permission. He managed to get a report out of the techs. A prototype bacterial factory had been set up, a clone to make the first of his molecules, and it seemed moderately successful. So Joe ordered the exhaustive analyses that would either prove the success or knock a hole in it.

  Catharin showed up to use the telcon. She was making a report to the Ship on the deteriorating condition of Fredrik Hoffmann. Catharin advised transfer to the hospital on Ship. She emphasized Hoffmann’s lack of infection by the newly discovered virus or any other. Even if it had gone quiescent, hidden in the nucleus of his cells, the diagnostic methods would have flushed a viral infection out. Organically, Hoffmann was clean.

  “Got a monitor in his room?” Joe asked. “Or did you get somebody to hold him down while you checked him out?”

  “I just took him his lunch. At meal times he’s at his most cooperative. He stands back at the other end of his room looking dejected. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Catharin’s report went on to advance the possibility of brain damage from stasis and/or poststasis therapy. Possibly the stasis had damaged the neurotransmitting proteins of the brain in this patient and others as well. Hoffmann’s case might be vitally informative if he was intensively evaluated and monitored in the Ship’s hospital.

  Ever vigilant and responsive, the Ship started sending down analytical responses to the hypothesis of brain-protein damage. Lights lit up all over the telcon. Catharin stabbed the file button in exasperation. “Why don’t you stop looking over my shoulder?” she snapped at Joe. “I know that you have no use for medicine. Certainly not the part that says ‘First do no harm.’“