Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  The glistening dark green hide had shiny dots on it. Part of the riddle suddenly fell into place.

  Manhattan had a string of dodecahedrons coiled like a necklace on a shelf in the planetology lab. It was the spinal cord of a zucchini slug. Zucchini slugs had shiny dots on their skins. “Did you just give the mountain a new crop of slugs?” His grin faded as he thought more. “Did you come in to give birth in this sweet shallow pool and get trapped when rocks fell from the roof yesterday?”

  It turned away from him and shuffled toward the barricade. Joe’s sympathy for the creature took an immediate nosedive, because in the flesh—if it was the same kind of animal as the fleshless skeleton he’d seen—it did not resemble a seal in the slightest. It was as ugly as sin. Its body had a wide, quivering flange around the edges. Its mouth opened and closed, and Joe could tell that gauzy flesh veiled the teeth. It might be a filter feeder. Then there was the lurid color scheme: green with purple spots.

  It could creep around the pool, but not make it over the rockfall that the tide had boiled through. And the tide had stopped streaming in. This was as high as it got. The tide was already leaking out through the barrier.

  The size of the braincase probably had more to do with the third eye than with intellect. But it displayed a modest amount of intelligence. It was trapped and it knew it. It investigated the barricade with apparent agitation, like a prisoner who’d just seen the prison door slam shut in his face for the nth time.

  A new wave of smells wafted at Joe. It came from this thing. A living Green-seal had even more smell than a dead one, a pointed, tickling smell that activated old memories in Joe’s brain even as he willed it not to happen. This time Joe smelled a brand-new laboratory dedicated to turning his theories into organism. Or maybe it was acrylic paint, because when he went to his parents’ home from that laboratory for the first time, it was the last night he ever went home and, Silke had been painting in her studio. Change a dog into a seal? Her face—with spots of acrylic paint on her cheek and chin—had reflected pure dismay. But Jato, that’s not right.

  Aunt Adrian hadn’t liked the news either. When are you going to change into a human? she had demanded.

  Jean-Claude, as ever, tried to mediate. He’s got to express his creativity, his own way.

  But Mike was furious. If you thought more about what’s right and wrong and less about doing what you damn well please, you’d never have taken that job. You sold your soul. Get out of here. I never want to see you again!

  Vladimir Pang-Park had helped Joe disown his family. In the national Net database, an altered version of Joe’s background unobtrusively replaced the real one. Joseph Devreze’s unorthodox parents turned into a respectable couple deceased in the Pantoxia virus that swept Chicago in 2085. He changed the Labrador into the sea dog in a fiery burst of creativity that helped him forget his parents. The same creative rush that also saw the first human mod. It died.

  You wouldn’t feel the same if it were you being changed!

  Joe staggered back as if he’d taken a blow to the face.

  He sucked in cleaner air, farther away from the Green-seal, his brain reeling. He regained his sanity by clutching scientific truth, like a life preserver in a maelstrom of feeling. The Green-seal communicated by odors. Complicated, maybe grammatical ones—smells that struck the human brain as compelling, unidentifiable, and evocative.

  Unable to resist communicating back, Joe went back toward the Green-seal. He crouched beside its prison-pond. “I could give you a human offspring, I think. Might take no more than a needleful of your cells, and splice in an interesting assortment of ours.”

  The Green-seal vibrated its flange, stirring the water, and emitted a new aromatic outburst, instantly evoking lab and hospital smells, Continental dinners, and the gene splice that had undermined a human mod’s metabolism.

  It was an accident. Joe had not known that one of the genes he’d spliced in would have that effect, and not until afterward did he understand why. The boy had smelled like honey and died before he was five years old. The Green-seal smelled like guilt. Shaken, Joe murmured to it, “But humanizing your genetic material wouldn’t do you any good, would it? You just want out.”

  He waded toward the rockfall and explored it. The Green-seal slithered out of the way to watch him with wide eyes.

  The news wasn’t good. The rockfall wasn’t solid, because water sieved through it; but it wasn’t going anywhere, regardless of how he pushed and shoved at it. The fall consisted of big raw chunks of rock netted in slippery roots.

  The Green-seal bumped Joe’s knees with its soft, quivering flange. Anxious to get out, it pushed at the rock as high as it could reach up with its beak. The water was shallow enough for Joe to see the flipperlike extremities under the flange, and how the flange was ragged around the edges from scraping against the rim and bottom of this tide pool.

  The Green-seal radiated smells. Fending off a new array of guilty memories attached to gene-lab smells, Joe said, “I get the message. You’re screaming help me! Why the hell not?” Joe squatted in the water and put his arms around the Green-seal. It quivered and flicked its head. Joe glimpsed the numerous pointed teeth in their fleshy veil. “Please don’t bite. My doctor would be very upset.”

  He hefted the Green-seal, and it went limp. Joe grunted. “Either you understand I want to help or you’ve got a fainting reflex like opossums. Hope it lasts.” Weighted down, Joe found first one foothold, then another, up the rockfall with his arms were full of limp, slippery beast.

  Joe stopped to pant. The Green-seal in his arms quivered, making its slippery weight harder than ever to hold. He desperately found a better grip. “Please stay calm. Look, it’s the least I can do. We wrecked your maternity ward, or cathedral or whatever it is down here, eh?”

  Joe reached the top and teetered there. He had the flashlight clipped to his belt. The dangling beam told him that he was looking down at deep water. The tide’s waves had more or less scoured out the rockfall on this side. Joe gathered himself and heaved mightily.

  The Green-seal flung itself toward the water at the same instant. Joe took a balancing step onto a slippery root and his foot slid out from under him. He struggled for balance. As he heard the seal splash, Joe fell off the rocks.

  He tumbled into water over his head. The water embraced him greedily. It refused to let him surface. Shocked, Joe recognized an undertow pulling him down.

  Joe fought the water. He could not let the undertow have him. If it pulled him to the sea he would drown long before he met air again. Fired by panic, he clawed at the surface of the water.

  Something bumped Joe in the stomach, then in the back. He was desperate for air now, kicking against the undertow. False lights from anoxia danced in his eyes. His lungs burned.

  Then something shoved him upward. Joe’s head broke out of the water. He gasped, filling his air-starved lungs.

  Something pressed against his back. Flailing, his hands hit a slick form behind him.

  The Green-seal had his jacket clamped in its filter-teeth.

  In its element, the creature was more than strong enough to push Joe through the water. He craned his neck and took greedy lungfuls of air. With stinging salt in his eyes, Joe couldn’t see where they were going, whether it was across the cavern or out to sea. Then his chin scraped something rough. He flung his arms forward to embrace a solid shore.

  Joe felt the salt water it drain away from his legs. A splashing behind him might have been the Green-seal flinging itself into the tide toward the sea. Then there was nothing but silence and darkness, broken only by several racking coughs and wheezes from Joe.

  Finally, with his lungs cleared of salt water and full of sweet air, Joe rolled over and lay on his back, exhausted. He studied the faint contours of the roof for a while. The glow varied. It pulsed. Long slow waves of light crossed from one end of the vast cavern to the other, and back, and met, and doubled on the thoroughfares of massive roots.

  He thou
ght about aspen-clones on Earth. Groves of trees were all the same individual, reproducing by sending up shoots. Some of Earth’s aspen clones had been very old. Here, the entire forest of fern trees could be just the cloned hair of an ancient root system.

  Next, Joe considered the flippers of the Green-seal. If it was analogous to marine mammals on Earth, its ancestors had roamed on the land before they sloughed off their feet and returned to the mother sea.

  Both ancient roots and flippered seals implied longer periods of climatic stability than was supposed to be the case here on Green. If it had been solitary for billions of years, before the new blue moon dropped in to stabilize the climate, how could such trees and such a beast as the Green-seal evolve?

  Joe felt a surge of excitement, nearly sexual in nature and intensity, familiar. He always felt like this on the trail of an original idea.

  The idea that had been crystallizing in his mind hit Joe like a blue bolt in the darkness. Blue isn’t new. Green had had eons of life with a moon in the sky, and produced animals, and intelligence: an intelligent species that moved Blue back in and then remodeled it in the sky. Finally—and still hundreds of millions of years before the present day—they died out.

  But maybe they didn’t die out. The cells of zucchini slugs harbored six million times more genetic material than should have been necessary to code the biology of the organism, even considering that the slugs were a stage in the life-cycle of Green-seals. Hidden in the Green-seal genome might be an entire evolutionary history that included the morphology and mentality of a tool-using, space-faring, planet-moving race. For that matter, there was enough genetic material to encipher racial memory. Maybe even an explanation for why they evolved back into Green’s sea.

  Ferns and slugs veiled a planetary history far longer than Earth’s and with vast uncharted convolutions. Green was ancient, but more than a case of failed evolution on a planetary scale: incalculably more than that. Joe sat up. His mood felt better, like a storm-battered, becalmed sailboat feeling a fresh light wind. He wanted to go back to Unity Base.

  But Joe could see nothing besides the roof. He had no idea where in the immense cavern the Green-seal had deposited him. The flashlight was missing from his belt, snatched away by the undertow, leaving only a broken belt loop. Joe was soaked, cold, shivering, and weak. Too shaky to walk, he dragged himself farther up the shore, hoping for drier air.

  Brightness puddled under his hands and knees, startling him.

  The dense sand that he was crawling on had living creatures in it, and when agitated, they glowed.

  He traced his name in the sand. Joe. He’d been Joseph on Earth, Jato to his family. He was Joe here. A name as plain and elementary as most of the technology used for the star expedition. But it looked too short. He added, + Cat, and liked it a lot better

  Joe’s eyes made out dim, oblong spots higher on the shore. He closed his eyes; the spots went away. Not retina lights. When he opened his eyes the spots were still there. And the oblong, indented shape was unmistakable. Joe got up on his wobbly legs and went closer.

  The glowing patches were footprints. His. Right size. The toes pointed toward the water. The Green-seal had brought him to the place where he had first discovered this underworld sea.

  29 Eclipse

  “Cat!” Somebody shaking her by the shoulders brought Catharin awake, disoriented.

  Becca excitedly pointed toward the ravine’s exit window. At the crest of the waterfall, Aaron held Joe by the collar like a truant schoolboy. “We found him!”

  Catharin’s spirits surged at the sight of Joe. She sprang to her feet.

  “What took you guys so long?” Becca called up to Aaron.

  “There was a steep passageway—”

  “We had to help him climb back up,” Wing amplified.

  “Is he hurt?” Catharin started toward them.

  But Joe held up a warning hand. “Stay away. I’ve been exposed to alien glop.” His voice sounded rough.

  Turning to Becca, Catharin commanded, “Go around to the other side of the pool!” She called up to Joe. “Come down here and wash up. Right now.”

  Catharin followed Becca around to the other side of the pool, retreating away from Joe as she watched him clamber down the rock wall. His hair was damp and disarrayed, strikingly black against the pallor of his face. His khaki clothes were wet all over and stained with the bright pink of water-wet blood. “What happened?” Catharin demanded in growing alarm.

  “I was looking for this.” He talked slowly and with effort, gesturing toward the pool. “Found something else.” Bruises showed on his arms as he dipped his hands in the clear water.

  “What, Joe?”

  “There’s an arm of the sea under the mountain and a dead alien sea animal. Remember the picture from Kite? Decayed. And a lot of saprophytes feeding on it. I got pretty close.”

  Catharin steered Becca to the hill of smooth moss, uphill from the pool, even farther away from Joe. Becca muttered, “Are you sure he’s not imagining things?”

  Catharin could not begin to judge Joe’s state of mind. “I will not take chances with you.”

  Wing and Aaron briskly washed their hands in the waterfall at a distance from Joe.

  “A live one too,” Joe announced.

  “A live sea animal? You saw one?” Becca asked across the pool.

  “Saw it. Touched it. Helped it. Then I fell in the sea. Almost drowned. I’m thirsty!” Joe drank deeply from his cupped hands while everyone else was stunned silent. “You were right, Carl, we shouldn’t have blasted the mountain. It caused rockfalls inside. Killed the first one. Destabilized the cavern. Last night’s tremor trapped the other one in a shallow pond. But I helped it out. That’s where zucchini slugs come from.”

  The rest of them stared at him.

  Joe sat back cross-legged with his hands wet. “I fell in and the current was dragging me toward the sea. I would have drowned. It dragged me back to shore. Saved my life.”

  “Hallucinations??” Becca hissed in Catharin’s ear.

  Suddenly Catharin couldn’t swallow for the cold lump of anxiety in her throat. Joe needed to be up on the Ship where they could heal his mind.

  Behind Joe, Wing stretched closer to examine Joe’s clothing. “There are punctures in the back of his shirt. It looks like the imprint of a long jaw full of teeth!”

  Galvanized, Catharin ordered Becca, “Start up. Now.”

  Becca started to object, “But he’s—”

  Catharin herded Becca uphill. “He’s hurt, but he may be carrying germs that are dangerous, especially to you.” Over her shoulder she said, “You three follow us. But stay away from us. Downhill. Downwind. Whatever. All three of you are possibly contaminated.”

  Joe seemed weak, his pace slow. Wing dropped back and slipped under his arm to help Joe uphill. “Catharin!” Joe called.

  She held her breath expecting, Help me.

  He pointed toward Becca. “Boy or girl?”

  Catharin let out her breath in a gasp. “Girl.”

  “Becca,” the battered man called up. “Will you name her Silke? For me?”

  For a moment, Becca’s face was a study in puzzlement and embarrassment. Only she could have recovered her wits enough to answer under circumstances like these. “Sure, Joe, it’s a very pretty name.”

  His face lit with a grin.

  Catharin took Becca by the shoulders and turned her to go up. “What are we going to do when we get to the Base?” Becca asked.

  “You’re going up on the shuttle and so am I.”

  Aaron heard that. “How will we manage without a doctor?”

  “Kay will have to assume medical duties down here.”

  Sounds carried on the damp, still air. Catharin heard the two-way as Aaron turned it on to notify Sam to call off the search. He asked Tulsa to prepare to take off without his copilot. “Tulsa objects and so does Kay and so does the Ship.”

  “It’s a calm morning. There’s no extraordinary dan
ger in the air. I’m still the Ship’s medical officer, and in that capacity, I need to be up there. Tell the Commander I said that.” She added, “In other words, Joe, I go. You stay.”

  He answered, “I’ll miss you. But I’ll work hard while you’re away. I promise.”

  That startled her. Enormous problem unexpectedly solved. With that thought, she forcibly moved her attention to her other looming problem.

  When she had dozed off beside the pool, listening to the semblance of words in the water, Catharin had finally remembered the end of her dream: she’d told someone—she wasn’t sure who—you will die and I will help you get ready. She’d distinctly heard those words, spoken in a woman’s voice in the dream. Forgotten, that imperative had tantalized her. Now that it had risen into her conscious mind, it was simplistic, no panacea at all. Just her own subconscious telling her that she had an unfinished job on the other side of the sky.

  The thunder of the ascending shuttle dwindled in the high distance over Unity Base. Joe, now scrubbed clean and decorated with bandages and carrying a bright disinfectant smell with him, dropped onto his bunk in the Penthouse. Wing sat down on his own bunk with a deep sigh. “What an interesting morning. I am quite tired.”

  “Sorry I disrupted your prayer service.”

  Wing pulled off his shoes. “From what you’ve told me, you completed it, I think. And now what, Joe? You must stay here instead of going back up.”

  “I’ll grab some sleep. Then do what she wants. Work on the medical problems, starting with the old guy.”

  Wing raised his eyebrows. “Have you not been working already?”

  Joe told Wing what he’d held back from Aaron. “Yes, but I couldn’t concentrate, because I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life.”

  Wing gave him a puzzled look. “Have you had a change of heart now?”