Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Joe shook his head to clear his ears of the ringing, his head of insane thoughts. This parade of symptoms was psychosomatic. The psyche part was running wild and giving the soma part fits.

  “Oh, my, fog is pouring off the plateau, there on top of the saddleback,” said Wimm.

  “It looks like water from a chalice,” Eddy breathed.

  “Great show,” commented Raj North. Alvin emitted rasping snores. Idiots, Joe thought. They wouldn’t know the difference between a holozoo and a tiger at close range in the wild, didn’t understand they were on the blue moon’s territory, where it had the power to create sensory illusions, lift up tidal bores as big as a small mountain, and plant compelling ideas in a human community. A starship full of people was no match for that moon. Joe was no match for it.

  His symptoms were adrenaline-related, Joe realized. His body was saturated with adrenaline because the blue moon intimidated him.

  And knowing that made it even worse.

  27 Morning Prayer

  The predawn air felt cold but fresh to Catharin as she and Becca climbed the outside stairs to the observation deck. “This is my favorite time of day here,” Becca commented. “It reminds me of being on the farm when I was little, but there’s even more time to enjoy the dawn while you do the chores.”

  Catharin stumbled.

  Becca quickly reached for Catharin’s elbow with her free hand. She had her flute in the other. “You okay?”

  “Just clumsy. There was so much on my mind, I didn’t sleep well.” That was an understatement. Catharin had had a bad dream, one that transmogrified the Ship into a hollow, awful place, with everyone dying around her. She had been helpless to halt the ravages of stasis. Terrifyingly, she had lacked the medicines and the machines to save her friends. After that nightmare, she had lain on her bunk too tired to be fully awake, too horrified to sleep.

  They found the observation deck swept clean and appointed with chairs and a table neatly draped in cloth. Among others—nearly everybody in the Base had decided to come—Maya and Sam sat together in earnest conversation. “Other people had a thought-provoking night too,” said Becca. “I think Maya’s getting interested in Sam’s religion.”

  Catharin located the shuttleplane parked on the runway below, ready to take its passengers up, and make her job easier. She had thought the morning would never come. She felt frayed to the breaking point. There was no sign of Joe either down there or on the deck.

  Becca veered toward Kay Montana. “Nice to see you here.”

  “I’m enjoying watching people trying rituals on for size like a crowd in clothing store,” said Kay.

  “The Acting Commander was right about how much we all needed this, wasn’t he?”

  Kay shrugged.

  “I don’t know either,” said Catharin. Joel’s experiment in comparative religion had certainly hit nerves in Unity Base. Hers included.

  A short procession emerged from the conference room. Aaron, Alvin, and Wing each carried an object with which they approached the draped table serving as altar. Aaron set down a raw red rock. Alvin, an unlikely acolyte, placed a battered piece of metal on the tabletop with an audible clang, which had the effect of galvanizing everyone’s attention like a rapped gavel. What Wing carefully positioned on his altar was a potted plant adorned with delicate purple trumpets.

  “Morning glory,” Becca whispered to Catharin. “I spent days weeding that out of cornfields when I was little.”

  Alvin passed out printouts with the words people would be expected to sing or say.

  “Ha,” Sam said. “Only Christians think worship means getting together to read something!”

  Wing stood in front of his altar. “Welcome to the last ceremony of Starfall. On the Ship, they will join in a Native American ceremony. Here, I offer the New Catholic matins, or morning prayer, a service which celebrates resurrection, day coming after night, life after death, hope renewed after doubt. And grace following after sin and error. After much struggle to find the best words to say, I decided that there are things here that speak in silent words better than any homily of mine! I invite us all to listen to these. The red rock is debris from where we blasted the mountaintop, destroying what existed here before us.”

  Leveling the mountaintop had been a necessity, Catharin thought, when they had no idea what level of biological hazard existed here. But just now, Wing had only said that the blasting destroyed what existed before, which was true enough.

  “This—” His hand hovered over the crumpled metal.

  Catharin heard a sharp intake of breath from Becca. “It’s wreckage from the crash,” Becca blurted. “What are you saying about Chase?”

  “I think this bit of wreckage accuses all of us. We misunderstood how different this world is from Earth. Jason was a victim of our overconfidence.”

  Down on the runway, pilot Lazlo Tulsa circled around his shuttle, preflighting the big machine. Kay would be his able copilot. They had all learned how to be smarter; there wouldn’t be another shuttle crash, Catharin thought, but her conscience immediately added, Unless.

  “And this.”

  “Not even I think morning glories are essentially bad,” Becca murmured.

  Wing smiled. “I have grave doubts about introducing our flowers, much less crops, to this world where they do not belong.” He stroked a leaf. He had a green thumb; nobody else in the Base had any luck with flowers. “Yet God brings beauty out of morally dubious success.”

  Still no Joe, not even arriving late. Being Wing’s roommate in the Penthouse, he must have gotten wind of the sin-and-error drift of this, and stayed away on principle.

  With a gesture, Wing brought everyone to their feet. “The service of matins begins with the Psalmody.” He chanted with a pleasant tenor voice, sentiments that Catharin did not believe, words that rang with twenty centuries of poetry and piety in the Western world. “‘In his hand are the caverns of the earth; the heights of the hills are also his.’“ The dawn breeze carried the phrases across the Mountain’s sheared-off crown.

  Next came a psalm. Catharin discovered that she remembered the words from childhood, from the years between six and twelve when New Catholicism had worked for her, before she discovered the extent to which humanity could, and should, forge its own fate. Next to Catharin, Becca’s voice rang out clear. Her family had raised sheep on their Tennessee farm. She identified with what the psalm said. Catharin’s own voice faltered on “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—” The dream last night had been exactly that. And she, the one who should have been able to dispel death, had failed.

  At the last word, “forever,” Becca stood beside Wing with her flute. Raising the instrument to her lips, she played a tune in a minor key. The dozen or so voices present here sang the words off the printout in ragged unison. Catharin recognized the old hymn used by the Navy for generations at the burial of the dead at sea. In the twentieth century a new verse had been added for aviators. Last came a verse for those lost in the line of duty in deep space. It sent a shiver through Catharin.

  Next Wing sang alone. It was a canticle, and he had chosen to sing it in Mandarin Chinese. Familiar melody and unintelligible words let Catharin’s mind skid back to her nightmare. The dream had ended on a weirdly positive note like the melody of Wing’s canticle—solemn but not mournful. Sober victory. Had another dream—a more optimistic one—overlain itself on her memory of the first?

  “Let us pray.” There was an anticipatory rustle. “For the ill in body, mind, or spirit, we pray to the Lord. We name them aloud and in our hearts.”

  Catharin did not believe in prayer, except as a mental focusing tool. And today she was focused already, on her responsibility. For which reason names came to her automatically. Bix. Lary. Wing named Frederick Hoffmann. We can’t just pray. We’ve got to fix them. I’ve got to fix them. Catharin felt an intolerable sense of burden, and wanted this to be over.

  “And for those who have died in this past year of thi
s new world, the several on the ship, and the completed life of Jason Scanlan.” Becca sniffled. Surviving the crash, Wing had first pulled Joe out and then gone back into the wreckage looking for Jason. The pilot had died in Wing’s arms. Wing sounded serene as he referred to it now.

  With a mental jolt, Catharin felt her nightmare fall into focus. Without medicine, she had known what to do. The awful dream had ended on a grace note of sorts. But she had forgotten exactly what it was that she had done to make it so.

  Wing invited silent meditation. The endless silence of Green followed, in which Catharin groped for the content of the conclusion of her dream. It seemed terribly important.

  Footsteps resounded as somebody ascended the outside stairs. He—sounding weightier than most of the women—was in a hurry. Expecting Joe, Catharin automatically turned.

  “Is it over?” asked shuttle pilot Lazlo Tulsa.

  “No,” said Wing. “Must you leave sooner than scheduled?”

  “Where’s my other passenger?”

  “Joe Toronto?”

  “Since he was in the earlier crash, I want to sound him out on how he feels about riding another shuttle. But he hasn’t showed, and this is the last place I know to look.”

  Catharin felt a flash of anger. Trust Joe to take a last rebellious walk alone and thereby disrupt Wing’s lovingly crafted ceremony.

  Wing did not look angry, but rather gravely concerned. “Aaron, we should mount search parties. Joe has been very troubled lately.”

  The hangar bustled with the activity of mounting a search. Unlike the night of the crash, there was no hesitation about searching, no delay in starting out. But what Wing was saying did not bode well. “I left him in the Penthouse when I got up at three a.m. to work on the matins, and so I don’t know when he left. But he’d been restless the whole night, moaning in his sleep.”

  Aaron groaned. “Three hours unaccounted for.”

  “I’ll take a party to the river,” said Sam.

  “Good,” said Catharin, fully furious at Joe now. He was troubled, but why did he have to deal with it in his usual solitary way, upsetting everyone and risking his irreplaceable talent yet again? “He’s attracted to water.”

  “There’s another place too,” said Wing. “I found a lovely pool on the mountainside and told him about it, but whether he could find it in the dark of the night, I don’t know.”

  Becca said, “After that rain we had, the dirt’s still soft. I can track, not that I’m an expert, but I served on a national park rescue squad one summer. Carl, let’s head out for that pool of yours and I’ll look for his tracks.”

  Aaron said, “There’s only one doctor. Which party should Catharin go with?”

  “I’ve got paramedic training,” Kay said.

  “Excellent,” said Catharin. “Go with Sam’s group, Kay. I’ll go with Carl.”

  “So will I,” said Aaron. “Wimm, you’re in charge of searching the Base. Domino, stand by the copter in case you get a call.”

  Sam’s search party—including Raj North, Alvin, and Kay—piled into the jeep and roared off toward Camp Darwin. Wing led his small group across the clearing toward the furry pines. The sun was finally coming up, pouring thick pink light across the ground.

  “The lichen doesn’t take our tracks,” said Becca. “I’d have to study it long and hard to find a sign, and I still wouldn’t be sure it was his.”

  Wing ducked under the pines. “There’s bare earth—I mean dirt—here.”

  Becca quartered back and forth under the trees. “Somebody did come this way. Somebody with long legs and running like something was after him.”

  “Something was,” said Catharin. Her anger ebbed at the sight of the faint scuffs in the dirt under the trees. She remembered the man sobbing in the rain. “He has excruciatingly painful memories nipping at his heels.”

  Aaron asked, “Did my Seder trigger that?”

  “Yes, but they were already on the verge of coming out,” Catharin said. “He’ll be better than ever if he comes to terms with his memories. If he doesn’t do something foolish.”

  Wing looked at her with worried eyes.

  Bands of mist lay draped over the mountain’s sides. “This is radiation fog, coming up off the ground,” said Becca. She and Wing held hands as they forged ahead. He knew the way better in and out of the shrouds of mist; she needed to look for clues; neither wished to make a dangerous misstep without being anchored to someone else. Catharin and Aaron followed.

  This fog felt warmer than Catharin would have expected. The mountain seemed just as alive now as it had last night when she looked at it from Camp Darwin. And here the impression was closer and more immediate, as though the fog were a long, long slow exhalation of living breath of a vast being under her feet. Her skin goosefleshed. It had been a long time since anybody in Unity Base called Green the World Wide Park. By now, they all understood too well that it was no park at all. “How well do we understand this mountain geologically?”

  Aaron answered, “We don’t. Just yesterday, our seismometers picked up traces of activity, as though rocks shifted under the surface. We don’t know whether it did that before we came, or if it’s still settling down from the blast. We do know that the mountain is not solid. It has hollow places, possibly a cave network.”

  Catharin absurdly free-associated. Lungs?

  Becca suddenly pulled Wing toward a fern tree in the mist. “Look at this broken frond branch. “There aren’t any animals here. None but him. He went straight downhill here.”

  Aaron put a hand on his two-way. “Are you sure enough for us to call everyone else?”

  “Well—no. We did have a few gusts of wind during the night.”

  Wing said, “If he walked directly downhill from here, he would have discovered the pool. Unless he veered to the left in the dark and fog. Upstream of the pool, there’s a ravine.”

  “He’s got too much sense not to have had a flashlight and watched where he’s going,” Becca said quickly.

  Does he? There were moods in which he’d jump into an alien river or break his hand on a tree. The young Green-day suddenly congealed around Catharin into a mass of dread. We can’t afford to lose him. I can’t bear to lose him. Years of medical training took over, enabling her to put feelings to one side and react decisively in an emergency. “You two go downhill to that pool. Aaron and I will check the ravine.”

  Catharin and Aaron picked their way through a narrow, fern-walled rock valley. The stream hissed and muttered around rocks large and numerous enough to constitute a precarious path of stepping stones. The air smelled damp and stuffy.

  In deep shade under the ravine wall, bunched pale fungi looked like corpses, like the body parts of bloated drowning victims. They were unspeakably ugly. Aaron discovered greenish and yellowish puddles of algae on the floor of the ravine. The algal ooze reminded Catharin of the ugly fluids discharged by diseased, dying patients.

  This is the valley of the shadow of death, Catharin thought. I will fear no evil, said the psalm. But Catharin was terrified. She felt the walls of death closing in on her. For the first time, she calculated the odds of fixing the damages of stasis with no genius to help. The odds were very bad. Catharin felt cold, even though her skin bore a sheen of sweat.

  A rock had fallen on one fungus, crushing it, near the ravine’s wall, which was heavily matted with roots. A zucchini slug appeared to be devouring the remains of the fungus. Catharin paused, watching in distasteful fascination. A slight, cool, weird-smelling breeze blew into her face. She shrank back from it.

  “Catharin!” Aaron waved for her to hurry. She waded across a shallow, pebble-floored widening of the stream to join Aaron where the ravine ended in a narrow rocky slot where the stream spilled out into a deep, rock-rimmed pool. Mist hovered over the pool, pearly pink in the early sun.

  Crouching at the water’s edge, Becca looked up. “I can’t tell if he was here. It’s all rock.”

  Shaking his head in disappointment, Aa
ron exited the ravine through the slot to make his way down and across the blocky rock wall beside the waterfall. Catharin followed him, gingerly finding footholds between the clumps of fern on the rocks.

  Wing suddenly surfaced in the pool. “Cold!” he gasped. He dove back under again. His shirt and shoes were piled beside the water.

  With one last long step, Aaron made it to the flat rocks on the rim of the water. He held out a hand to Catharin to help her join him there. Wing reappeared to shake his head. No sign of Joe.

  “We must be on the wrong track,” Becca said unhappily.

  “Maybe Sam found him,” said Aaron.

  “She’d have called,” Becca said.

  “If he got this far, he would have flung himself in and had his swim,” said Catharin.

  “I c-could explore the bottom more,” Wing said through chattering teeth. “It has dark fissures. Deep springs.”

  Catharin suddenly remembered the weird, cool breeze in the humid ravine, and what Aaron had said about the Mountain having hollow spaces. “I think we’ve overshot. There’s a cave opening up there in the ravine.”

  They looked at her uncertainly.

  “He’s not crazy enough to swim into an underground fissure, but I think he’d go into a cave.” She didn’t know Joe all that well. But an intuition that felt certain spurred her back toward the rocky slot, back up into the ravine.

  “Something skidded down the ravine wall,” Becca said. “Look at these mossy rocks. The moss only grows on the top side, but the rocks were dislodged and now they’re willy-nilly.”

  “Here’s the cave,” Wing said. “Behind these roots. They’re loose enough to push to one side.”

  “Which he did!” Becca said excitedly. “See the rootlets torn loose?”

  Wing called into the dark opening. “Joe! Jooooe!” His voice seemed to fall into a long, empty place. Catharin would not have ventured in there if her life depended on it. But she was convinced that Joe, in his fey mood, had. After a long listening minute, Wing shook his head.