by C. Gockel
Beyond a few words of business, they had not spoken since Joe had shoved Becca into Catharin’s arms the other night. Feeling suddenly slightly disoriented, Joe asked, “Do tall girls have growth spurts?”
Catharin smiled. “I certainly did. My parents even took me to the doctor when I was twelve and shot up from five four to five eleven. They thought I was a mutant.” Her mouth leveled, squeezing out the smile. “That ruffled my fragile self-image. Later, though, height helped me pass for older. I went to college somewhat early.”
“I got dragged to the doctor on suspicion of being a mutant too.”
“For your growth spurt?”
“Not that. When I was a kid, I only slept about three hours a night.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You don’t sleep very much now. I thought that was . . . recent.”
“Hell, no.”
“In fact, I thought you were bipolar,” she admitted.
He snorted. “You’re about the sixteenth doctor or guidance counselor to wonder about that. No, non, I’m not a mutant and not bipolar either, even if I do have traits that make people start to wonder. Not needing much sleep is normal for me. So’s moodiness. I don’t go on spending sprees, but I do have a high sex drive. It’s not manic, it’s constant. So you won’t get to practice psychopharmacology on me. Sorry,” he bristled.
“I’m not sorry at all.”
Her voice was pitched a shade lower and slower than he expected. The tone gave Joe pause. Had he admitted to more than what he’d intended? High sex drive, he’d blurted. He wondered what Becca had shared with Catharin. Joe felt his face heat up.
“Are you coming to Wimm’s party tonight?”
Joe shrugged.
“Oh, do. We haven’t had a party since Unity Base was founded, and it’s about time.”
congratulations sam read a large, hand-lettered banner. The river explorers were being feted for getting their feet wet. Wimm had opened the patio roof despite a cold night outside: he had the heating units going full blast. Lights had been strung up around the patio. Clouds skidded across the night sky above, ice-blue where they crossed the gibbous blob of a moon in the west.
Joe felt a brittle watchfulness centered on him as Domino shepherded Becca away. Catharin promptly walked up and handed Joe a drink. Wimm had hops plants growing in a corner of the greenhouse and claimed to have synthesized a reasonable approximation of fermented barley. But what Wimm called nearly beer was not, in Joe’s opinion, near enough.
Catharin nudged Joe. “Look at the time.”
“Where?” Then he saw the object suspended over the patio, a ridiculous thing: a dial clock, kludged together. “That?”
“Alvin made it. Go ahead and read it. What time does it say?”
“Twelve fifty—What?” The dial of the clock showed thirteen numbers, and the hour hand was pushing thirteen, thirteen o’ clock.
Catharin laughed. “It’s been up there the whole time, thirteen and all! You didn’t notice.”
Sinking, the moon behind the clouds reddened. The clouds went unearthly purple for an eerie moment, then back to gray normal. Joe breathed easier. With the moon out of sight, the party seemed more like a university mixer. Somebody put on bland but danceable music.
“You do dance?” Catharin put a hand on his arm. Yeah, and trip on my own feet ever since I got here. Thanks for the opportunity to trip on yours in public. Joe abandoned his not-too-near beer on the side table, and started off across the floor with Catharin.
He was surprised to find her a good dancer. She wore earrings that gleamed as she moved. Real gold, Joe thought, and a nice accent beside facial features that were regular and attractive. It dawned on Joe that if it had really been a university or lab mixer in his previous life, he would have singled this woman out of the crowd to start with.
Distracted, Joe stepped on Catharin’s left foot. “Sorry,” he muttered.
As a new song started up, Aaron materialized beside Catharin. “May I?”
Catharin glided away with Aaron. So Joe borrowed Eddy for the next dance. He started something. For the next hour nearly everybody tried a round with everybody else. Joe had Catharin one more time, and she pulled him close to whisper, “Thank you for coming.”
Late in the night, Joe went back to the Penthouse for a few hours of sleep. Wing was already sacked out, getting his well-earned night’s rest after his participation in the successful field trip. Joe didn’t sleep readily. His body wanted company in here other than the peaceably snoozing Wing. Joe tossed and turned, his mind full of Becca and Catharin, the women tangled together in a skein of arousal and consternation.
He’d thought that Catharin hated him. And that the feeling was mutual. And, finally, that she was inhibited. But he began to think that he had been wrong on all counts. Beyond a doubt, her self-control was intentional.
Joe slid sideways into an uneasy sleep and dreamed about the gibbous blue moon high in a strange sky in a shroud of purple cloud.
21 High Tide
The telcon window showed images taken by Becca Fisher from Kite weeks earlier. Sitting in the conference room with Manhattan, Samantha Berry, Becca, and Catharin, Joe watched the window as raptly as the rest of them. The Ship’s Intelligence had enhanced the images, originally blurred and distant, into a still imperfect but tantalizing clue to life on Green.
Cloud-diffused sunlight put a faint sheen on the river’s estuary. In the water, for only a few moments, a dark oblong shape appeared. It might have been a submerged rock or shoal. Except it moved against the tide.
Joe wanted it to be a seal. It probably wasn’t even close. The idea excited him anyway. When he was little, he’d been Silke’s son. He’d imagined being a Selkie’s son out of a myth. And he grew up fascinated by the transformation of living beings. Anything remotely resembling a seal would make Green far more interesting to Joe Toronto.
“Everybody seen enough?” asked Aaron.
“Not by a long shot,” said Sam. “But we’ve looked at that picture enough.”
The telcon window switched to the people Upstairs—Captain Bixby and the starship pilot, Atlanta, who asked, “Was that a sea monster?”
Sam said, “Maybe a single large bony fish, but more likely a school of smaller fishes.”
Joe suppressed a skeptical grunt. To his eye, it hadn’t moved like a swarm.
Sam continued, “On Earth, estuaries were rich breeding grounds for ocean life. Here, in spring, the river’s mouth may harbor tendrils of the highest forms of life on Green. We should take Beagle into the estuary.”
“That’s the reward,” said Aaron. “Now we’ve got to evaluate the risk, and—” he nodded toward the telcon “—ask for permission.”
“We know the worst danger,” said Sam immediately. “It’s the moonlight. We know to curtail ambitious activities in proportion to the amount of moonlight at night. If we leave at Green-dawn, Beagle can make it to the estuary and back well before the sun sets. The sooner we go for it the better. The moon is new again. There’s only a trace of moonlight mixed into the daylight. Captain, in space-faring terms, what I’m proposing is a modest little day trip.”
The Captain nodded slowly, probably reflecting on his own role in the hazardous exploration of the Solar System. Smart move on Sam’s part, to allude to that: by such a yardstick, her expedition did sound like a Sunday picnic.
“I’ve decided,” Bixby said. “The quarantine will remain in effect for six weeks after the trip, until Cat sees if anybody develops strange fever. But you have my permission to go for the river. Wish I could come along.”
Beside him, Joel Atlanta nodded too. With both men in the same picture, both in Ship’s coveralls, the contrast between them was stark. Atlanta was a man in his prime, brown-skinned features regular and smooth. Bixby looked aged and sick. His face was laced with wrinkles; the skin had a pallor that made it look like crumpled paper.
Joe suddenly realized who Patient Doe was. Not a nobody and not an anonymous field of molecular wrecka
ge.
A week ago, Joe had transmitted up to his staff the specifications for DNA repair of Patient Doe’s blood. They created a retroviral package containing the material for functional hemoglobin and infected his blood marrow with it. Patient Doe had since reported feeling better and had been able to get up out of bed.
Joe could see with his own eyes how much more repair work Bixby needed to keep him alive. Joe forgot about fish in the gray river. He had more exciting work: wrecked DNA in a real man. If Joe could bring order out of that chaos, and make Bixby better, it would please Catharin—
Wanting to please Catharin? That impulse, a shadowy feeling flashing under the surface of his mind, quickly submerged again, and left Joe disturbed.
A handlettered appeared overnight on the mess hall’s bulletin board: samantha (sam) berry hereafter wishes to be known as s. houston.
The name sounded like a good fit, Joe thought. Hadn’t Sam Houston been a general somewhere? Mother Nature in combat boots.
For a change of pace, marking the big day of the expedition, breakfast was served alfresco, on the patio, the thin wedge of the dome with a roof that could be rolled back. Plenty of seating was provided by crates and rolls of supplies. The air outdoors felt cold and fresh, buffered by heating units on the patio, and the sky looked pretty: a predawn lapis lazuli, shading to violet, a rim of magenta on the horizon. Wimm had done his best with the synthetic-eggs Benedict. The food tasted good with general anticipation for sauce. Knives and forks clacked against plates. Wing came up with a plate in his hand. Joe made room for him on the crate. “Launch still looks good?”
“According to the Ship, we expect clouds by late afternoon, but no rain.”
Aaron and his assistant, Maya, clustered with Sam and her lieutenants, finishing up the plans for the expedition. There was no sign of Becca. But Catharin arrived looking better put-together than almost anyone else at this hour.
“Catharin is a cool customer,” Joe said to Wing.
“She’s like a violin. Quiet and tightly strung.”
“D’you suppose she ever lets her hair down?”
Wing answered with a promptness suggesting he’d reflected on this topic before. “I think her nickname, Cat, is apt, Joe. I think she has the soul of a tiger.”
Catharin swerved over to join them. Either she was being sociable or, more likely, sensed them talking about her and came to take control of the situation. Wing did not miss a beat. He chirped, “We have a difference of opinion, and you’re on my side.”
“I am?”
“When we left Earth, he took the new surname Toronto to honor his home city. Many others have done the same.”
“Not home, favorite. People are still doing it,” Joe contributed. “Seen the mess hall bulletin board?”
Catharin gave a quick smile. “That’s her way of expressing confidence in everything we’re doing.”
“You believe in the same things, but you didn’t change your surname,” said Wing.
“I don’t have to,” she said pleasantly. “I have my middle name, which my parents gave me in honor of a city. One of the luminous cities of the Western world.”
She said no more, so Joe guessed. “Los Angeles?”
“Certainly not. Did you ever study history?”
Wing offered, “Athens. Athena?”
Catharin smiled. “Close.”
“Rome, Roma,” said Joe.
“Even closer.”
“Italy? Venice. Milan. Florence—”
“Right.”
“You don’t look like a Florence,” Joe commented. “And the time I was there it didn’t look like much of a city.”
“Didn’t you notice the old cathedrals and campaniles? The glory was cracked and faded in places, but it still showed, an echo of the Renaissance. As to your other remark, my parents used the Italian form.”
“Firenze,” said Joe.
Sam began rounding up her troops. Catharin said, “Take good care, Carl.”
“No rain today,” said Joe to Wing. “So make your own luck.”
Wing hurried away. Catharin checked her watch. “I almost forgot, I’ve got a conference with the Ship in three minutes. No time for breakfast now. May I?” She helped herself to a triangle of toast from Joe’s plate, giving him a sparkling little smile. Joe was left with the plate on his lap and the word “Firenze” echoing in his mind like a campanile chime.
The riverboat had met its destiny, floating capably toward the sea. Unfortunately, the trip differed little from the uneventful maiden voyage. A few organisms turned up, scuttling aquatic bugs and slugs trailing in the bottom slime.
Joe sporadically listened in to the chatter between Beagle and Aaron and the biologists on the Ship. Joe knew those people, the xenobiologists, most of them scientists of the pedestrian type that he disliked. They had limitless interest in protozoa and slime. The prospect of mollusks sent them toward ecstasy.
Joe amused himself by hacking his way into Catharin’s virtual notebook—her private one. Having the name of Bixby to go on, Joe found the man’s medical records in full. And a highlighted note. Joe, I’ll tell you all you need to know. Just ask me. Please stay out of these files. Respect his privacy.
Damn. She’d anticipated him, even while it was getting progressively clearer to him that he did not understand her at all.
Hearing footsteps, he quickly closed Catharin’s notebook. But the steps belonged to Alvin Crawford. The shutters of the Medical section’s skylight had developed a piercing squeal, evident as Alvin cycled them open and shut from the control panel. “Must be the squeak Snow White was complaining about,” said Alvin, and laddered up into the ceiling.
Joe grinned at Alvin’s turn of phrase. He wondered where the prim princess left off and the tiger began. It had to be an interesting boundary layer.
Shuttering the windows made the telcon picture more vivid. A high riverbank was lush and green with what looked like grass, an assumption that went unquestioned until Wing pointed out that the grasses of Earth had been very highly evolved plants. Beagle launched a canoe carrying Wing and the limnologist, Tezi Young, to investigate more closely.
Alvin clumped back down the ladder and tested the skylight, which now rolled back and forth with an efficient whir. Joe’s opinion of the Vanguard went up a notch. They had the sense not to rely on engineers for maintenance work.
The riverboat team members aired concern about the rocks at the sides of the river. Fractures in the rocks evidenced the impact of violent water. The river originated in the highlands to the west. Someone speculated that floods of melted snow came down in the spring. It was spring now. And a warm day. Fortunately, automatic water level monitors were positioned upriver and would warn of sudden snowmelt in time for Beagle to retreat to the shelter of one backwater or another. No such signal had come yet, and the meteorologists on the Ship thought a flood unlikely. Proceed, said the Ship.
Sam, on Beagle, asked the Ship to repeat the anticipated time of high tide. The river should be rising already, she was told. “Your calculations are off. Run through ‘em again,” she replied. “We haven’t seen the river rise an inch.” Sam’s voice sounded assured, the tone of a captain of her own ship.
Beagle veered toward one green bank. The image from a camera on the boat showed a steep slope covered by bright green tubes. Not grass: long worms, rear ends anchored in the rocks’ cracks and crannies, bodies suffused with algae that soaked up the midday sun. The whole limp, slimy lot would be submerged at high tide.
The xenobiologists on the Ship sounded overjoyed.
Passing through Medical, Catharin reacted to the image on the window. “A colony of worms as extensive as that? Yuck!”
The image or Catharin’s fastidiousness irritated Joe. He threw down a pencil. “Some Eden!”
Catharin stopped and crossed her arms. “Why the foul mood?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, come now.”
“Maybe something’s on my mind.” Something othe
r than the stew of sexual feeling that Catharin’s presence stirred up. “I always get crabby on the brink of realizing something significant.” He peered at his window on the telcon window.
“I might also say, go sleep on it. Take a nap.”
“What I really want is a good swim.”
“Well, you can’t have it. Stop grousing. Just try to not think about whatever it is and maybe it’ll come to you.”
Beagle asked the canoe about rising tide. No, the canoe hadn’t noticed any rise of water either. Wing had been watching a certain rock with a long horizontal fracture, just above the waterline. The fracture had not been inundated.
“They’re having a real field day out there,” Joe grumbled.
“They’re doing what they love—what they came for. We thought we’d find a planet with green veins. The primary exploration mode would be the riverboat.”
“You too. You’ve got what you came for, what you’re trained for,” he said bitterly, holding his aching neck.
A fleeting hurt expression crossed her face, as though he’d hit a nerve, but she said, “What’s wrong with your neck?” She stood behind him and probed his neck and shoulder, removing his hand to do so.
“Ow!”
“It’s probably a muscle spasm.” She massaged his neck. It felt good. He lowered a shoulder. Tall lady, long fingers, and she knew the spots to hit. She rested her hands firmly on his shoulders. “Joe, one of these days try taking an interest in our dream instead of just walking away from the rest of us.”
His mind flashed back to the day he had walked away from the river party. The day was filed in his memory as a kaleidoscope of images, mostly too gloomy or lurid to be a pretty sight. But the pattern suddenly shifted in the vision of his mind’s eye to one of galvanizing simplicity. “Does tide ever come in all at once?”
“I have no idea.”
He described the single, river-wide, breaking wave that pushed a stick upstream, raising the water level as it did.