Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Lary said excitedly, “We’ve got half an hour before the winds from the approaching hurricane get up to gale force.”

  “We’ll be done by then.” Suspense propelled Joel up out of the chair to pace around the command station.

  Becca’s voice came from Unity Base. “It’s up to our little friend now. Kay, I’m handing the link over to you.”

  “Got him,” said Kay.

  The hatch in the drone’s tail section opened. A canister fell out and tumbled toward the bottom of the slope, rolling faster the farther it went. When it reached the rim of rubble around the base of the island, it hit a rock and took a dramatic bounce, spinning in the air. The canister landed amid fractured boulders beside the surging sea.

  The bottom end was heavily weighted, so the canister settled with that end down. The top end popped open. Tango Twenty-One extended the front half of its body from the canister with quick, constrained movements of its legs, then paused, like a hunting spider in its trapdoor, to survey the wet-streaked boulders all around it.

  An urgent order from the orbiting Lodestar came to the spider, relayed from the drone. The spider quickly exited its canister and scurried uphill, up and over rocks, just before a wave boiled behind it, sweeping the empty canister away.

  The robot spider paused in a field of pebbles uphill from the larger rocks beside the sea. Most of the stones were varied shades of gray similar to the broken boulders the spider had just clambered over. Some were a darker, monotonous bluish-gray, just like the bulk of the island that loomed above the spider. The island was made of hard stuff. But the sea, chewing at it for eons with teeth of wind and water and stone, had nibbled off some small pieces.

  Obeying directions relayed to it, the spider used its front legs to grasp an island-dark pebble. It stuffed the tiny rock into a pouch glued on its underbelly. The spider then extended its front legs to elevate itself an extra inch, raised its eyestalk like a periscope, and looked out to sea. Waves surged in from the dark ocean, ranks of white foam one behind the other. Beyond the surf, the horizon was clotted with gray cloud. Distant lightning stitched the juncture of sky and sea like strands of brilliant thread.

  The spider pivoted to trek uphill on the storm-scoured flank of the island. Wind gusted. Almost blown away, the spider flattened itself to make a lower profile. At the top of the hill, the drone’s wings were flexing even in its sheltered parking spot. The drone pirouetted around, its nose seeking the wind.

  The wind dropped off for a few moments. In the lull, the spider scuttled uphill and dashed the length of the drone’s fuselage, running between the wheels to where the cargo hatch door made a ramp. Skittering up the ramp into the drone, the spider packed itself into a waiting, empty canister and shut the canister door, ready for the ride home.

  Taking off was easy. Becca disengaged the brakes and let the drone weathervane around to face the wind off the sea, then let the wind lift it. Staying up was hard, because just above the boundary layer of air between the mounting winds and the sea, a strong wind shear almost pitched the craft into the waves. Jet engines blazed to full thrust, and the drone raised its nose toward Green: a huge, pale green ghost of a world-moon above the battlements of hurricane on the horizon. The image of Green silenced the chatter in the control center.

  Becca’s voice sounded loud, coming over the link from Unity Base. “Wow! The spider almost got drowned or blown away and I almost crashed the drone into the sea on takeoff, but we made it! We got the contingency sample! Wings coming in now.”

  The drone folded its wings back against its fuselage, its engines switched from air-breathing to rocketing, and the drone became a missile boring a hole in the storm-racked sky of Blue.

  Kay and her copilot began maneuvering to rendezvous with the drone. It would be several days until Lodestar returned to Aeon and the canister was disinfected, transferred from the spacecraft’s cargo bay to the laboratory in the Starship, and opened.

  Joel had a word with Bix. Bix knew some geology; he’d pecked out rocks on the surfaces of moons from Jupiter’s Callisto to Neptune’s Triton, and had prospected with robots on Mercury. Brow in jagged furrows, mind off his problems, he told Joel what he thought about a rock formation like that island—uniform weathering, the dull blue albedo of the island under the bright sun, and the luster of the blue pebble. “Ever hear of goldstone?”

  Joel left Bix’s bedside with the universe on his mind—a more complicated and contradictory universe than he had previously believed. He went directly to the Captain’s office and keyed into the Captain’s telcon. It responded to his thumbprint. Bix had long since taken care of that.

  They were all surprised when Joel summoned them to the telconference: Miguel Torres tuned in from the Life Support Systems office, and the microbiologist Srivastava from his lab. Marie Mike Sisseton looked up from her personnel files. Downside, Catharin, Carlton Wing, Sam Houston, and Aaron Manhattan crowded into the telcon-cam field of view in the Unity Base conference room. “What’s up?” Catharin asked.

  “We need a holiday,” Joel answered. “Not a little bitty, glad-it’s-Friday holiday. We need a real, honest, full-bore holiday.”

  “The occasion is the successful mission to Blue?” asked Sisseton.

  “Yeah. But this holiday is more than that. It needs to be a religious holiday.” Seven intelligent faces regarded him with different shades of surprise. Joel continued, “I’m Baptist. Miguel’s Old Catholic, Wing New Catholic. Marie—?”

  “Native American.”

  “Cat is humanist, Manhattan Jewish, Sam Houston’s Neo-Pagan, Srivastava Hindu—did I get everybody’s affiliation right?”

  “I don’t think of my philosophy as a religion,” said Catharin.

  “I need your opinion too.”

  Manhattan sounded bemused. “There are several more sorts of religion or philosophy held by people down here.”

  “And more up here!” said Srivastava.

  “I know. You all have to speak for your friends and anybody else whose worldview you understand. Now, a holiday is a holy day, right?”

  Wing and Manhattan nodded. Catharin conceded, “That must be the etymology.”

  “I’m thinking about holidays like Easter, like Christmas in country churches. Passover. Lunar New Year. I don’t know what you other folks do. Anyway, celebration of important things in the past. Such as, that we came here to these worlds after a long journey that killed some of us—”

  “That’s not to celebrate,” said Cat.

  “Oh, but it is,” said Wing.

  “Remember the Day of the Dead,” said Miguel across the telcon link to Catharin.

  Joel continued, “Holy days are about the present too. How the present is a critical time, a mixture of things known and things unknown to us.”

  “Mysteries, yes,” said Wing.

  Mysteries. One of which looks like it’s gonna get bigger and brighter real soon. “People aren’t cut out to stare a big mystery in the face and say ‘Oh, how cute’ and go about our business.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” said Catharin. “We won’t understand everything about Green and Blue, even after today. It will do no harm to . . . publicly acknowledge? . . . as much.”

  Carlton Wing nodded. “You envision a collective gesture, above what each individual is feeling and fearing. A corporate action.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. Not compulsory for anybody—but available for everybody.”

  “What a difficult idea,” said Srivastava. “It might be better to—”

  “I’m not taking a poll on this. I’m announcing it and I’m asking you all to help me make it work.”

  Catharin asked, “Is that an order?”

  He hesitated, then took the plunge. “Yes, Cat.”

  “As you wish. I’ll cooperate,” she said. He sensed the rest of it, unspoken. You’re the commander.

  Sam Houston and Manhattan whispered together out of the telcon’s pickup range. Sam announced, “We’re with you.”

/>   “So how are we to call this holiday of yours?” asked Srivastava.

  “What’s day after tomorrow the anniversary of, in Green time, one revolution around the sun?” Joel countered. He got blank looks from everybody but Catharin.

  “Oh,” she said. “So it is. One Green-year ago, the Ship stopped here.”

  “Starfall,” said Joel.

  It was well past midnight when the urgent call came to Joel from the planetology center. They had received the rock sample only two hours before. The geologist who made the call, a man named Yandell, wore a rumpled white coat and a grave expression. “Analysis of the sample is yielding impossible results.”

  Joel called Lary, who had chosen to spend the evening modeling Blue in the control center. “Come meet me in Planetology,” Joel told him. “The other shoe’s about to drop.”

  A bit had been sliced off one end of the pebble. The trimmed pebble and the spider rested inside the white-lighted clean box, behind a contamination barrier.

  Yandell displayed a thin, translucent section of the end of the pebble, magnified hundreds of times. Pointing at the image, the geologist explained in an agitated tone, “This is not a natural rock.” He rattled off telltale technicalities of microcrystalline structure, chemical composition, and hardness.

  Lary seemed calmer than usual, rather than excited. Joel’s aged great-grandmama would have sat in her favorite recliner and said, I told you, boy. The dying have second sight.

  Yandell finished, “I assure you, that is material from Blue. It’s not possible that anyone substituted anything by accident or by way of a joke. But there is no adequate explanation for it!”

  “If it’s not natural, it must be artificial,” Joel supplied.

  He could see the geologist’s mind lock up like a braked train wheel, throwing sparks, at the word “artificial.” “But—but it’s the predominant rock in the island—and apparently every island—on Planet Blue!”

  Under magnification the specimen was sapphire blue, with an elaborate, sparkling crystalline structure. Joel’s eyes ached. He’d been up late tonight researching rocks and minerals on his own. Including nomenclature. “It’s Scheiderite.”

  Startled out of his reverie, Lary flashed a sweet grin.

  Yandell said, “Commander, let me try to explain more clearly. If I weren’t certain it came from that world, I’d tell you it was man-made, without a doubt. But every island on the world!”

  “Definitely Scheiderite,” said Joel.

  25 Commemoration

  Joe heard it from the edge of the clearing on top of Unity Mountain: the shuttle booming toward Unity Base for a landing. The boom marked the end of the seemingly endless quarantine, the day he’d awaited for months. Now it was not what he wanted to hear.

  Out here in the open, he’d first kissed Catharin at night, held her, and she’d tasted sweeter than anything he could remember. They’d tried it a few more times and it was even better. And last night, he’d slipped into her bunk room, and she’d spent the night in his arms, exhausted into a weary haze, but clinging to him, and he’d been happy to hold her and cuddle her when she roused. But then somewhere in the long hours of the night, he’d realized how much he was afraid of her.

  Wheeling, Joe faced a lopsided furry pine tree, half its branches blown off when the mountaintop had been blasted flat nearly a year ago. Joe struck the tree’s bole with his fist. The pain gave him something to feel other than the feelings that seethed in his gut like acid.

  “Good afternoon!” Joe instantly recognized the cheery voice from one of the few throats he wouldn’t have wanted to strangle for interrupting him in this mood. Wing emerged at a brisk pace from the pines, decked out in field clothes and gear, returning from a hike downhill. “Let’s go greet the—” He broke off, looking closely at Joe. “Has there been bad news?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. I’m having a bad day.”

  Joe heard the shuttle again, loud enough to jerk his head up to look. From out over the lowlands, it roared in, startlingly big and blazing, heavy iron compared to Becca’s Kite.

  Wing said, “I made a discovery for you today. Albeit a belated discovery, since the quarantine is over and you will return to the Ship on the shuttle.”

  “Maybe.” Joe ground the word out.

  “On the north side of the mountain, below that romantic dell of yours, the stream flows into a deep, clear pool. It’s the size of a swimming pool—and deeper, like a rock quarry—and very clear. Eddy can test the water, but it looks clean enough for swimming.”

  “Thanks for the thought. I may not go back up after all.”

  Wing raised his eyebrows. “I thought you looked forward to that above all else, Joe!”

  “Carl, what I want is to do my work. Not what Catharin wants me to.”

  “I see.” Wing seated himself on a rock with a fractured edge where the blast that flattened the mountaintop had split it off the parent stone nearby. Both rocks had sheets of new, blue-gray lichen already skeined over the new raw faces.

  Joe said savagely. “I’ve sampled DNA scans from the whole population. It’s the same story. I’m certain the whole germ line is damaged—mostly in places on the DNA that won’t be expressed in this generation but will show up in the next generation or so. Carl, I never wanted to be a doctor because people bore me, and now I don’t see any end to the work she’ll have me doing!” He ground the knuckles that he’d bruised on the furry pine into his other palm.

  “You don’t have the right facilities down here, such as the virtual arena on the Ship. That will make the work better.”

  “Yeah, and I feel at loose ends without a virtual arena to work in. But that’s not it. I don’t want to throw all of the rest of my life into this.” Joe paced. “Not even to save the human race.”

  Anybody else in the Base would have sputtered and contradicted Joe. Wing just asked, “Then why would you?”

  “What are you, the devil’s advocate?”

  “Sometimes. Why would you try to save the human race?”

  “Because that’s what she wants me to do. And I’m so far in love with her I don’t think I can live or love without her!”

  If that surprised Wing, he hid it well. “Ah. I know sleeping on your problems won’t do you much good. You might try swimming on it.”

  “I can’t swim back to Earth!”

  “The rest of us can’t either,” Wing said dryly. “Or we’d join you. We’re sad and afraid. And homesick, even if most of us thought Earth was a sad home.”

  “On Earth I dreamed up weird and wonderful creatures, and they worked, they came to life. I could have done unspeakable things too, and I didn’t. Don’t I get any cosmic credit for that?” The words spilled out, surprising Joe. What was this, he asked himself, confession?

  A mechanical roar swept across the mountaintop. Shuttle coming back to land, having dumped off the speed of its atmospheric descent. Joe jerked his head up at the late-afternoon sky. A ribbon of vapor twisted across the air, the smoke of the shuttle’s first pass. It looked like DNA on a blue field only slightly paler than virtual reality. The contrail dissolved in the winds aloft, like a dying dream, and the sight twisted in Joe’s stomach like a knife.

  Wing seemed to read Joes’s pained expression. “I don’t know any way for you to square the circle either,” he said. “That may change. Sometimes life is more gracious than we expect, or have a right to expect. Magic happens.”

  “Or doesn’t.”

  “Or doesn’t,” Wing agreed. “Let’s meet the shuttle. News was supposed to be coming down with it.”

  “Good idea.” Joe still felt rotten, but the pressure inside was less unbearable, as though caustic steam had been vented. It was going to build back up, though.

  Parked on the runway, the big flying machine loomed over the clustered base people. A lanky woman in a flight suit stood on the shuttle’s steps as if addressing the crowd. But she wasn’t speaking at the moment. Everybody else was. Aaron gestured animate
dly. His hand clipped Maya on the side of her head, followed by an agitated apology in her direction. “Something tells me the news was a bombshell,” said Joe.

  Aaron saw Joe and Wing arriving, and turned toward them with consternation written on his bony features. “The sample from the moon was artificial, not the result of natural processes! All of the mountains on Blue are the same stuff and—”

  “Somebody manufactured it. Two hundred million years ago!” interrupted Becca. “Another intelligent race—”

  “At least that explains—,” Sam Houston began.

  “Planeformed, it was planeformed!” shouted Aaron over everybody else.

  Joe’s mind reeled to the single most important question. “Where are they? Was anybody home?”

  The woman on the shuttle’s steps answered him. “The Commander asked me to personally bring the news down, rather than transmit it, as a courtesy to you folks down here, and I was briefed in full. The answer, I can assure you, is no. We’ve got a planeformed world up there with not a single sign of life on it. Does everybody copy that?” Her crisp alto carried over the crowd. “No life. The water vapor in the air tells us that the seas are acidic. There were no traces of microbes or algae in the sample. And the planeforming isn’t two hundred million years old. The weathering is. We already had reason to think that Blue was a rogue planet, captured by this sun and this world only a couple of hundred million years ago. It could have wandered between the stars, frozen solid, for ages and ages before that.”

  A world in stasis? Joe thought. The crowd buzzed. Catharin turned to Aaron. “Aaron, this is truly momentous. Can we postpone your ritual until after we’ve done all the debriefing we need to about Blue?”

  Aaron folded his hands and drew himself up to his full, spare height. “No. It must begin at sunset, and I have the Commander’s full support on that.”