by C. Gockel
“What’s this?”
“The extent of our problems.”
“Statistics?”
“No, profile of one individual. Male, fiftytwo years old. I think he—” Her voice broke. She had to struggle to keep talking. “He’s really sick.”
Joe had eidetic memory. Now he remembered with photographic clarity how he had seen her earlier. Lying on her stomach on the couch—a very attractive pose, but also the way somebody would have looked if she had cried herself into a brief sleep, and the cat had come to purr comfort and then bed itself down on the small of her back. When she had woken up and yelled at Joe her eyes had been red-rimmed. Even before Hoffmann made his escape—and part of what made her forget to bar his door?—she was worried to tears. “This patient is not hopeless yet, but heading that way, eh?” Joe asked.
She nodded. The corners of her lips quivered. “Keep the information on that wand to yourself. It would upset people.”
18 Winter
“It’s okay now, Cat. It’s okay!” Becca tried to reassure her, sitting with her on the edge of the bunk in Catharin’s room.
Mutely Catharin shook her head.
“Go ahead and cry,” Becca coaxed.
“I can’t,” Catharin whispered. She felt an ache deeper in her spirit than she could comprehend, locking tears and feelings into a block of agony. She doubled over, burying her face in arms folded on her knees.
“Oh, Cat!” Becca flung her arms around her.
“He’s crazy. But he’s right.” The words came out with difficulty. “I cast my vote for the moon search. And the rule of my profession is ‘First do no harm.’ I betrayed that,” she gasped.
“No, Cat, No! It was a good decision. Look what we found.”
“Look at the shape we’re in!”
“Something tells me what you know is worse than what you’ve told anybody else.” Becca’s voice sounded uneven, but her embrace did not falter. “Maybe you better tell me everything. You can’t keep it to yourself.”
Catharin let out a sharp, short cry, muffled in her hands.
“What hurts now? Cat?”
“I’ve already said too much. I may have made one more terrible mistake. I gave Joe a report that shows the score. How badly the molecules are hurt. As though I could trust him—”
“You can! We saw that today.”
“I need him more than I ever imagined. If he can repair the human genome, many patients will be saved. I don’t know how he’ll react.”
“He wouldn’t turn his back on sick people, would he?”
“I don’t know.” Tears leaked out. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Sickness and violence. Not this bad, not this soon, impossible to fix.” With clinical detachment, a part of Catharin’s mind noted that she was trembling uncontrollably. “I’m up against too much. Just like my parents.” That broke the dam, and she started to cry. “What can I do?” she asked in a sob-strangled whisper.
“For starters, cry as much as you need to.”
The doctor got what she wanted from her colleagues on the Ship, and when the shuttleplane came booming out of the sky to collect Hoffmann, Joe watched from the observation deck along with most of the rest of the Base personnel. It was a good show. Hoffmann had been doused with disinfectant, stuffed into an environmental suit, and then deposited—drugged and sluggish—beside the runway. The shuttle remained on the ground only long enough for two men in environmental suits to drag Hoffmann aboard. One of the men threw out several large bundles of supplies, and the shuttleplane blasted away.
Climbing for outer space, the vehicle soared over a bank of clouds so gray that they were almost steel blue. “They cut it close,” said Sam Berry. “That’s a polar cold front coming.”
Joe had always liked weather because it reminded him of his own moods: sometimes stormy, sometimes crystal blue. Now he wondered about that. He’d felt a brief black storm of anger yesterday. But what about all of his other feelings, the ones he’d once compared to brilliant sunsets or summer nights?
Had he left the best half of his heart on Earth?
When Joe returned to Medical, he found Becca watching Catharin finalize the instructions for Hoffmann’s biolock on the Ship end. Hoffmann was scheduled for removal of epidermis and all bodily hair, prior to a full six weeks in strict quarantine and confinement in the hospital. When Catharin signed off, Joe remarked, “You’re not unhappy to put him through that.”
“I don’t like him,” she said bluntly. She still looked frayed around the edges.
Eddy trotted in with a parcel. Catharin took it from him and then smiled. “It’s a care package from Lary! Joe, do you like scones?”
With fresh coffee, the scones tasted better than anything Joe had eaten while on the Ship. Somebody up there could work wonders with the mess machines.
“After you hit the sack last night,” said Joe, “I looked through that wand you gave me.”
She gave him a wary look that Joe interpreted as please don’t ruin my day yet.
“I can help him.”
Catharin exchanged a significant glance with Becca.
Joe got the idea that Becca knew more than he did. He felt a stab of jealousy. Disgruntled, he asked Becca, “Are we going to have weather today?”
“There’s always weather, remember,” Becca answered.
“I’m ready for something more dramatic than the usual.”
“You might get it. A strong cold front is bearing down on us. When it collides with the moist air from the sea, there’ll be some snow. Maybe even hail.”
To Joe’s disappointment, no hail was forthcoming. Mount Unity’s first winter storm arrived with weak gusts of wind, like the puffing of an overexerted old man. Then came a mild and steady snow. Joe turned to his work.
A couple of bacterial clones had failed badly, the worst of which put out monoclonal antibody contaminated with bacterial toxin. Numerous analyses, debates, and proposals for variations in procedure ensued. Joe did not have a high tolerance for the inevitable, dull, and inconvenient problems of turning theory into practical mass production. It doubly frustrated him to direct the process long distance through an offandon link to the Ship’s Intelligence.
In the early Green-evening, 1700 p.m., Joe decided to take a walk. Alone. He went to the conifers at the edge of the Base clearing. It had long since stopped snowing. With a half-Blue up, twilight was thinner than it had been the night of the crash. At half strength, the blue light made snowflakes dribbling off the furry-pine branches look like pale plastic confetti.
Joe looked straight up at the moon, challenging. Half blue day with cloud swirls, half dark night with glimmers of lightning, the hurricane moon lorded it over the winter sky. A filmy cloud crossed the moon, and the light seeped into the cloud, like a streak of luminous paint across the night sky.
Spectacular as it might be, the moon didn’t exert any tangible pull on his brain. No mysterious forces muddied Joe’s logical thinking. Joe smiled thinly. The hurricane moon might motivate planetologists and inspire artists. Maybe it had triggered Hoffmann’s psychosis, but Hoffmann had been so unbalanced as to tip at any trigger, or none. The blue moon would have no appreciable effect on a healthy mind.
His gaze drifted to the stars in the sky, faint flecks washed out by the moon. Under the starry sky the whole winter world lay still, glazed, gave his eyes and other senses no particular impression to latch onto. His mind phased to another winter sky over the city of Toronto. Freewheeling, his mind flashed through memories that had not visited him in such clarity since before he took to the Ship, since years before that. Eidetic, photographic, the memories were clear as glass. They were also emotionless. In stasis.
He turned back toward the dome. Under the jacket he broke into a cold sweat. He started running.
Entering the Medical wedge door in a hurry, Joe nearly collided with Catharin. With dignity, she pushed him away. “Well. Frustrations all worked out?”
“Just stepped out to take a look at th
e sky. Can we see the stars from here?”
“What do you mean?”
“The star Mira. Where is it? Can you ask your friends upstairs?”
“I can answer you myself. We came more than two thousand light-years. Ordinary stars are too faint to be visible that far without a telescope.”
Disconcerted, and knowing that it showed, he threw off the jacket, hurling it a chair. The telcon windows were full of Catharin’s business. “Reapportion. I’ve got work to do.”
“So do I.” She examined his jacket. “These flakes of snow didn’t fly up off the ground onto your shoulders. They fell off the pines, didn’t they? You were out in the forest alone. Why?”
“Experiment,” he said with reluctance. “Wanted to see if the moonlight at half strength addled my brains.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“Not true. You dashed in here like something was after you.”
“That’s it. Nothing. Nothing to mesh with the brain. So the brain freewheels. Memory, fantasy, stream of consciousness overflowing, running out of its banks,” he said, desperately glib. “But nothing tangible, nothing real comes from the moon.”
“Thoughts affect biochemistry, just as much as biochemistry affects thoughts. The end results can be indistinguishable. If the moon simply provides a kind of ambiance for certain kinds of thought and feeling, that’s enough for real effects.”
“That sounds like pure superstition.”
“Even superstition works if people think it does. And that is medical fact.”
“I need to get some work done,” he said flatly.
“Certainly.” She started battening down her business on the telcon. Halfway through, she looked up. “When we left Earth, there were many women named Mira.”
Joe shrugged away from her inquisitiveness. “That was then, and this is the day after forever. Mind your own business.”
Joe was impossible. En route to the basement domain of Quartermaster Wimm Tucker, Catharin seethed with exasperation. Joe was arrogant but charming. Intrusive. But sometimes so unwittingly vulnerable that she felt a very inconvenient warmth of sympathy for him. Worst of all, from her point of view: he was unpredictable.
Catharin found Wimm in the warehouse, sorting the supplies included in today’s drop from the Ship, with Eddy helping him. Wimm was a middle-aged man, pleasant-looking rather than handsome, with neat sand-blond hair. “One confidential item for you,” he said, and handed her the wand she had been expecting.
Eddy said, “Can’t they transmit information coded for your notebook?”
“Not with a snooper in my notebook.”
“Joe?”
“Joe.”
Wimm, Catharin, and Eddy looked at each other. Wimm said, “He’s a bright, beautiful bastard, isn’t he?”
She sighed. “Right on all three counts.”
“Does he play chess?” Wimm asked.
“I doubt he has the temperament to be good at it.”
“Well, I might just challenge him tonight. After I have my go at Aaron.”
“Losing a game of chess might do him some good,” Catharin said.
After supper and another hour of work in Medical, Catharin went to the mess hall, which doubled as recreation room, to find almost everyone else already there. At the wide end of the wedge-shaped mess hall, Aaron and Wimm were setting up their championship chess game. Boredom, thought Catharin, taking a seat near the door, was when this many people showed up to watch chess.
Unity Base resembled Antarctic or Martian or Lunar bases: an isolated community with long nights of winter outside and severe constraints on anyone’s going outdoors. Not alone. Not in bad weather. Never in the twilight. By now, people were showing raw edges that hadn’t been apparent months ago. Some tended toward irritability; others had assumed an artificial cheeriness even more grating to the nerves. Off in one corner sat Raj North, the man who had wandered off from Sam’s survey team, which had led to Carlton Wing being added to the team and Raj being consigned to work in the greenhouse. Raj, visibly malcontented, cast a one-man pall over his corner of the room.
In another corner, Maya London flirted with Joe. She stood close to Joe with chin tilted up toward him, then made a half turn with a little flounce of her hips and a look over her shoulder with long eye contact, tossing her head so her hair rippled. Classic, textbook flirtatious behavior, Catharin thought with sharp displeasure. Worse, Joe seemed to encourage her. Everyone else covertly watched the little sideshow.
Fortunately, the chess match started, and attention turned to that. Maya departed from the mess hall while Joe, Catharin noticed with satisfaction, stayed.
Catharin’s satisfaction lasted only until she realized that Joe, for the benefit of the people in his immediate vicinity, was imitating Maya. He pantomimed her flirtatiousness, including the flounce of the hips and the toss of imaginary long auburn hair. Shock waves and amusement went around the crowd, derailing the chess game.
Becca Fisher walked in through the door near Catharin. “Did I miss a joke?”
“Joe was ridiculing Maya behind her back.”
Becca grinned. “That’s safer than doing it to her face.”
“It was extremely rude,” said Catharin.
Becca sat down at Catharin’s table. She worked hand cleaner around her fingertips, then pulled out a handkerchief to wipe them with. “If you come right down to it, I don’t mind it one bit if some rudeness comes around back to her.”
“Why?”
Becca fidgeted. “She wouldn’t dare be rude to you. You’re beautiful. She’s no threat to you.”
“Or to you,” Catharin said quickly. “She’s competent but shallow.”
“She puts me down whenever she gets the chance. I can live with it, but I don’t have to like it. Or her.”
Catharin felt embarrassed. She had been oblivious to Maya’s attitude toward Becca. Too busy looking for stasis sickness, for pathology like Hoffmann’s, she had failed to notice something that hurt her friend.
After the disruption, the chess game got under way again. Eddy approached Catharin. “Did you see what Joe did?”
“Nobody in here didn’t.”
“Are you sure he’s straight?”
“I’d swear it,” Catharin said.
“I’ve never seen a straight man that good-looking who could imitate a vamp that good.” Eddy sounded fascinated.
“I once had a stallion like him,” Becca said. “That horse was a perfect gentleman with mares and nags. Full of himself and high-strung, but a gentleman. Except when it came to other studs. Then he was a prancing holy terror.”
“What a fascinating image,” said Eddy.
The Maya episode had evidently undermined Aaron’s concentration. Wimm trounced him. Then Wimm invited Joe into a game. When Joe took him up on it, Wimm rubbed his hands. He was an understated, competent man, but the gesture said that he relished this challenge. The galvanized crowd clustered around the players.
Joe Toronto radiated intensity. With his attention fixed elsewhere, and all eyes on him and Wimm, Catharin could study his good shoulder bones, and sculpted hands. She could hear him from here. “Your move.” Without the all-too-typical sarcasm, his baritone voice was clipped, attractive, deep enough to be solidly masculine, high enough to be more interesting than a bass rumble. A chill shivered through her, a manifestation of pure physical attraction.
Catharin was living in the crucible of winter in Unity Base. Sexuality and jealousy, love and animosity, depression and aggression were crystallizing, cross-linking like a lattice of chemical reaction, affecting her as well as everyone else. She swore to herself that she would guard her dignity, unlike those who were finding various ways to lose theirs.
Muscles on the side of Joe’s face bunched in frustration. Shortly thereafter, he lost his game.
Sky brightly blue over his head, Joe followed a rough trail. It looked, even felt, like a winter morning. His breath condensed white. The cold kept down t
he alien smell of the pines. He set out to walk off the frustration of losing to Wimm Tucker last night.
To his surprise, Joe met Sam Berry stamping her way uphill. “I’ve got a jeep stuck on the road, and I need a big strong helper,” Berry announced. “One who doesn’t mind getting dirty. Most people can’t stand the thought, but you’ve already been baptized in Green-mud once already. How about it?”
“Let me at it,” Joe said cheerfully. The more exercise the better.
Berry was short and pear-shaped in middle age, but wore well-fitted field clothes and hiking boots and abundant gear attached to her belt. He had to press to keep up with her hiking pace. She veered off on a faint trail that twisted among rocks and furry pines. “On a clear day, there’s a fine view over this way.”
Sightseeing was fine with Joe. Threading across rough mountainside that was piebald with wet spots and shadowed, unmelted snow, the trail reached a promontory, a piece of solid mountain bone jutting out over the lower slopes. In the distance lay the hazy sea. A sliver of the sea thrust into the blue-green land.
Berry said, “Once Upstairs gets over their willies, I’m going to take the boat that way. Down the river into the estuary. That could be one of the richest veins of life on the planet, if this one is anything like Earth.”
“A motherlode of sea bugs and slugs, sea-zucchinis, eh?” Joe would have liked a stormy, mysterious, dramatic seashore, preferably inhabited by seals, not just a broth incubator for overgrown invertebrates.
“There may be more to discover than we even dream. This is an alien world. Anything can happen here.” Berry put her arms on her hips. “Except for one thing. I doubt we’ll ever fill this world up with people like we did the last one. As much as the Vanguard is dead set on reproduction, it won’t be as easy as it used to be. Right?”
Joe was fully aware that Catharin wanted to keep the truth a secret. But Berry had figured it out for herself. Joe saw no reason to lie. “Right. Sorry.”