Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “That has to change,” Catharin said flatly.

  Walking quietly, she stopped just inside Medical, in the shadows around the door. Joe was on the telcon. She watched him, unobserved herself. He seemed to be scrolling through gene scans, one after another. Catharin shook her head in silent amazement. It took most trained medical professionals half a day to decipher one of those, so they relied on AI interpretations, which, post-stasis, were anywhere from inaccurate to misleading. But Joe could apprehend more about DNA at a glance than most researchers could see in an hour.

  With him, everything was fast. Life. Love. Work. Moods. Especially moods. Kissing in starlight had been wonderful. She’d been pleasantly stunned by how romantic and gentle he could be. Unfortunately, she had every reason to think that his mood could easily morph into something less enjoyable for her. Maybe it already had. The set of his shoulders said something beyond concentration. His shoulders were slightly askew, and Catharin read bad mood in that.

  It had been wonderful in the starlight. She wanted to hold on to the memory because everything later this evening had been so jarring. She didn’t need to experience a foul mood of Joe’s right now. She quietly backed out of Medical, and returned to the telcon in the conference room.

  24 Blue’s Mountain

  No matter what the topic, Joel Atlanta enjoyed speaking to Catharin via telcon. He would have liked it even better to see her in person, but the quarantine precluded that for the time being. “So you think it’s time to take Blue by the horns,” Joel said.

  “Yes, I do. That’s not why I called you back, though.” Her face was serious—more so than usual for her. Intense.

  “Go ahead, Cat.”

  “The quarantine has outlived its usefulness. True, there may be biological hazards down here. But Joe needs computer holo-capability to do his best work. And I’ve now got a pregnancy on my hands. Never mind who. I’m not sure she or the fetus are safe here without the kind of prenatal care available only on the Ship.”

  “Whew! That’s good news at a bad time.” Joel rubbed his forehead in consternation. “I don’t think we can put that in the balance against the safety of the Ship and have it come out anywhere near even.”

  “No. But that’s not the way things are.” She crossed her arms. Joel recognized Catharin’s unyielding mode. She had made up her mind, and her resolve now consisted of steel. “The greatest danger lies in what we arrived here with—damaged genes and big brains that are susceptible to moonlight and madness. It was on Earth that nature in the form of germs was out to get us. That is not the case here.”

  “That’s a change of tune for you, Cat.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But you better think about it too, Commander.”

  “Acting commander,” Joel corrected.

  “It’s no act, Joel.”

  “Hel-lo, Joe!” screamed the green parrot, flapping its wings excitedly.

  “Jo-el,” said Joel. “Hubert, say Jo-el.”

  Hubert ducked his head, signaling a desire to have his neck scratched. Joel complied absently, his mind on Catharin and her unexpected—unwelcome, he had to admit—advice.

  Hubert swung upside down on his perch, hung by one leg, and pecked at the dangling, homemade bell, causing it to jingle merrily. Just like any other Amazon green parrot—just like one that hadn’t been frozen for a thousand years—Hubert was a brassy clown of a bird. Not many people here knew why Hubert was so named, that the parrot’s namesake was a guy who could be a brassy clown. Not often and never on the job. But Joel had seen the man clown around on more than one memorable occasion. But that had been before the star trip and stasis that went on so long that it was too near forever.

  Joel held a finger out to the bird. “Hubert wanna go with Joel?”

  “‘Ubert go!” the bird screeched, climbing onto the finger. Joel transferred Hubert to his shoulder. Claws gripping the fabric of Joel’s shirt, Hubert fluffed his feathers and leaned forward expectantly. “Go!”

  “Hey, not so loud in my ear! Put on your bedside manner, you noisy bunch of feathers.”

  Responding to the affectionate tone Joel used, the parrot cooed, “Go bedside.”

  Hubert Bixby grinned. “You look like a damn pirate with that parrot on your shoulder.”

  He’d been better for a while, up on his feet for most of a week. Now he was worse again. Flat on his back in the infirmary bed, Bix made less of a bulge under the sheets than ever, Joel noted with alarm. He was losing weight. Going downhill fast. Bix drew in a deep, ragged breath. “Gonna pirate my Ship?”

  Joel was speechless for a moment. “No!” he sputtered.

  “You ought to. I’m not up to it anymore.” Another ragged breath.

  Joel tried to sound calmer than he felt. “I want to ask you about something. Cat thinks we’re in so deep that quarantine’s pointless.”

  “I sure am.” The gnarled arm lying outside of the sheet was tracked with needle punctures—the marks of the therapies that had to be delivered intravenously. “Sorry. I can’t be much help anymore. I feel like I’m just waiting for something.”

  Joel sat down in the chair, overcome by implications in what Bix had said. Catharin had once told him that the terminally ill often wait for holidays and such.

  Agitated, Joel crossed his ankle on his knee. Hubert promptly marched down Joel’s chest and up the leg to the knee. That much closer to Bix, Hubert fluffed his feathers and regarded Bix with one beady eye. “Hel-lo, Bix! Bix! Bix!”

  Bix grinned again. His mouth was crooked—not just a wry twist, it looked jagged. “I must have a parrot word for a name.”

  “I don’t. He ignores the ‘el’ on the end and calls me Joe.” If Joe Canada is such a genius, such a miracle worker, it’s high time for him to prove it. Do his molecular-biology thing before it’s too late for Bix. “We’ve got a little expedition coming up. You may want to tune in, starting tomorrow.” Joel indicated the wall telcon window with his thumb.

  “Downside?”

  “Nope. This one’s ours—the Ship’s. It’s time to check out Lodestar, and a trip to Blue and back ought to do it.”

  Bix nodded. Interest mitigated the pain inscribed on his face. “Couldn’t ask for a better test distance. How’d Lodestar do in the static test?”

  Joel made a circle of his thumb and forefinger. Sensing that Bix was more relaxed, Hubert Parrot preened, balancing on Joel’s knee. Joel named the three-person crew he’d selected for Lodestar’s test run. Flight engineer, copilot. “And Kay Montana is pilot/commander.”

  “Good bunch.”

  “I’ll look over their shoulder. And while they orbit Blue, they’ll drop out the winged drone for a spin in Blue’s atmosphere. And maybe land on one of the islands.”

  Bix grunted dubiously. “That drone’s a valuable piece of hardware. Blue’s hurricanes could turn it into titanium confetti. You want to risk it just for a show of flag-planting?”

  “It’s not just flag-planting. Ever since the riverboat got hit by the bore, morale has slipped, and Sisseton the psychologist is testing everything and everyone for altered human factors. I want to prove that the Ship can mastermind an exploration job and bring the people and the hardware back in one piece.”

  Bix just shrugged.

  Joel let a deep sigh filter out inaudibly. Bix wants me to make the decisions now. Fair enough. But when I need to ask somebody “What the hell do I do now?” who is there?

  Hubert Parrot looked up at Joel with one beady eye. Joel did not like what he read into the bird’s look. You’re it.

  On the Big Picture, the interplanetary exploration craft Lodestar maneuvered against a glittering star field. Sitting at Aeon Command, Joel watched as steering jets flashed on nose, tail, and stubby wings and the spacecraft pirouetted against the stars.

  The Aeon Foundation had bought off-the-rack equipment when it could, and IEC Lodestar was a prime example. Lodestar was just aerodynamic enough to duck into a thick, low-gravity atmosphere like Titan’s in the
Solar System. Rockwell Mars Ltd. had designed it for speed, to be a fast courier between the colonies on Luna and Mars and the moons of the outer planets. It had taken Lodestar a bit under three days to reach its present low orbit around Blue. The winged drone was tucked into Lodestar’s cargo bay. All systems were go for the drone’s big day on Planet Blue.

  Lodestar yawed, its nose swinging past the point of view that Aeon’s Intelligence had fabricated for imaging of this moment. Behind the spacecraft, a wide blue horizon entered the picture. The world looked deceptively like Earth from this initial oblique angle: you couldn’t tell that there were no Earthlike continents. The stars faded, outshone. The planet rolled farther up, and the Picture revealed the hurricanes tattooed across its blue ocean skin.

  Unlike tattoos, these marks moved. Fast. Joel turned toward the Planetology station. “Lary, you still think there’ll be a window wide enough to take the drone down in?”

  “Sure. The windows are high-pressure ridges between the lows that are the hurricanes. The touchy part is finding a window that will move over one of the islands at the right time.”

  The barren blue-gray islands were inconspicuous. Given the swirling cloud cover, Joel could not make out any of them in the big bright expanse of world on the Big Picture.

  Kay Montana appeared in a window in the Picture. “Lodestar to Aeon. Maneuvers completed. All systems go.” Her short hair and close-fitting coveralls were only slightly fluffed out in the zero gravity, her manner military crisp and a bit more deferential than it used to be.

  Nobody questioned his right to sit in at Command station. Not Kay, not the control center folks. Nobody objected to the fact that it was Joel, not Bix, making decisions today. Maybe the time had come. That didn’t mean he wanted it that way. “Let’s go over the steps toward releasing the drone.”

  Due to the finite speed of signals crossing the void between the Ship and Blue, it was several seconds before he saw her nod in reply. “Opening payload bay doors.”

  “Let’s talk com-con,” said Joel to Planetology.

  The man at Lary’s left, a telecommunications coordinator monitoring the complicated link between Unity Base, Aeon, Lodestar, and the drone, opened the communication-configuration matrix on the Big Picture. The matrix showed times when starship, Lodestar, Unity Base, and—since they wanted to do the operation in local daylight—the sun happened to be in the right relative places: an array of times scattered over the next three days.

  A seam appeared on Lodestar’s wide back. Clamshell doors eased open. Sunlight fell through the doors, shining on the drone inside, neatly bundled on its launching rack, wings folded back like the fins of a flying fish at rest. With the same slow grace, the clamshell closed again. “Payload bay doors check out operational,” Kay reported.

  “Okay, Lary,” said Joel. “Match up your storm tracks with the com-con matrix. What do you get?”

  “We have an alpha window.” A fast-moving, storm-free high-pressure area would cross squarely over one of Blue’s islands. “Sixteen hours from now.”

  Every head in the control center turned toward Joel, expectant. He thought about the drone—a priceless piece of equipment—about the depth and turbulence of that blue atmosphere, and how fast the windows moved. He felt the need to decide settle on his shoulders, digging claws of conscience into him, heavier and more onerous than a green parrot.

  Joel made the inevitable conservative decision. “We won’t land this time around. Just in and out. The drone’s instruments can read what we need to know. Landing would be showing off—like planting the flag. It’s not like some other nation is going to beat us to this moon.”

  Joel waited for an outburst from Lary. If the guy was obstreperous with Bix, he’s gonna be downright insubordinate with me.

  Lary said, “May I request a conference to discuss the risks and benefits of landing? A private talk, that is?”

  Joel concealed his annoyance. “Sure.”

  The fact that Lary offered coffee and scones lent the flavor of sweet-talking to the conference, held in Lary’s office. Joel accepted a scone. But he resolved to judge the case on the strength—or lack of it—of Lary’s reasoning.

  Lary started off by explaining how he had come up with the window, what he expected in the way of wind speeds near the surface of the water, and a description of the geometry of the island he wanted the drone to land on. He produced a communiqué from Becca Fisher declaring the idea doable.

  Joel pocketed a corner of his scone for Hubert. “But how do you justify the risk?”

  Lary had barely nibbled on his scone. He pushed it from one side of his plate to the other. “I’m afraid I’m not very objective. There’s a burning question I want to answer.”

  Joel wondered if Lary had grown bonier, his face thinner, in recent days. But he’d not had much jowl to start with. “What question?”

  “What kind of rock are the islands made of? Whatever it is, it’s ubiquitous on Blue. Every island falls into the same range of color and albedo. Basalt is an obvious guess, but woefully inexact. If we knew exactly what kind of basaltic rock, composition down to the microscopic and chemical level, and could guess what geological process formed it, maybe we’d be able to understand why the islands on Blue are arranged the way they are. The positions of the islands have a maddeningly geometrical aspect. Look.” On the office telcon, Lary called up a model of Blue. False-color red dots represented the islands.

  Joel saw what Lary meant. There was a pattern. It seemed incomplete, though.

  “Mind you, we’re talking about mountains. Each island is a mountain peak. Our theories of orogeny and plate tectonics can’t explain the mountains being where they are!

  “There are a million other questions, starting with life-forms, if any. Do algae live on the islands, or is anything else able to withstand the storms? Oceanic organisms? Are there extinct life-forms on Blue, fossils? But this one question—what are the islands made of?—that may have to do it for me. I really would like to know before I’m extinct. Which may be rather sooner than I might wish. You see? No objectivity.”

  Oh, no, damn, no. The scone sat heavily in Joel’s stomach. He’s sick too, got sicker later but quicker than Bix. He would. He’s a thin, birdlike guy, and birds get sick fast and hide it until they keel over. Joel forced out a simple, rational question. “I see what you’re saying, Lary. And I agree with you that this is important. But how will landing the drone prove what Blue’s mountains are made of?”

  Lary’s eyes sparkled from fever or inspiration. “Let me explain, if I may, about weathering processes.”

  The control center hummed with excitement.

  “Drone’s away,” Kay reported. The Big Picture showed it launched out of the shuttle’s bay, arcing toward the blue world below.

  Joel’s fists clenched and unclenched with tension. Maybe he should not have okayed this. But it was a golden opportunity to check out the shuttle and its deployment operations. And visiting Blue was a wonderful adventure. Everybody on the Ship and in the base, the sick and the well, had tuned in today, fascinated. Maybe we can pull of an interplanetary, unmanned exploration better than we can muck around down on Green. If something goes awry, Becca can abort the landing. She will if there’s any reason to.

  “Fisher’s wired in now,” said the telecommunications coordinator.

  The Big Picture illustrated the drone from an imaginary viewpoint that stayed a certain distance above and behind it as the drone descended. Penetrating the thicker part of the atmosphere, the drone bucked and tossed in the gales of Blue, plummeting toward a small region less shiny than seawater: one of the bare islands of Blue.

  “Jet engines on,” Becca’s voice reported. “Airfoil control looks good. Broken clouds at seven thousand feet.”

  Arrowing toward the island, the drone’s cameras and instruments clicked away, and the Big Picture reproduced what the drone registered. One face of the island rose up from the sea abruptly, steep and featureless. The opposite fac
e had a much more gradual slope. “It looks landable,” Becca reported. “Moderate wind blowing down the sloping side. That slope’s really smooth. I’m surprised. Most sea islands I’ve seen are craggier than this one.”

  It was one of the universe’s least interesting islands. Monochromatic, barren, and almost symmetrical, it would have been a steep cone had not two hundred million years of hurricanes’ onslaughts scoured one face to a shallow slope.

  Approaching the island against the wind, the flying machine flared as it neared the dark rock slanting out of the water. The drone’s nose pointed up at a thirty-degree angle, and its wheels reached for the surface.

  A voice in the control center announced, “Touchdown!”

  “We did it!” somebody else crowed.

  Even in this interlude between hurricanes, the prevailing wind that spilled over the top of the island made the drone rock and dance as it taxied uphill. Planet Blue was never calm.

  The Big Picture now came from a camera in the drone’s nose. The island’s crown was a smooth dark curve in the jumpy picture. Most rocks in the wild aren’t that smooth, Joel thought. And most rock formations had soft spots for the weather to chisel away, resulting in interesting shapes. The stuff of this island was very homogenous indeed. . . .

  The skin on the back of Joel’s neck prickled as Lary’s hints came together for Joel, into a mental Big Picture, one that jarred him. Sick people wait for Christmas and such. But great-grandmama said they see other worlds. This isn’t what the old lady meant, but . . . Joel felt an impulse to panic, order the drone to blast away, out of there, now. But now he wanted to get a piece of Blue too. Besides which, sick people also hallucinate. He broke into a hot sweat.

  Becca managed to taxi the drone into a slight fold of the rocky slope, out of the worst of the wind. “Brakes on. Here’s hoping they hold,” she said, her command flying on toward Blue at the speed of light.