Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “I can’t explain this to her,” Joe panted. “I’ll botch it if I try. But she needs to know now. Atlanta better know the score too, but I can’t bring myself to tell him. Carl, I never thought I’d need a priest for anything, but—”

  “I will speak for you,” Wing said.

  Working in her laboratory in Level Seven, Catharin followed the progress of the eclipse in a telcon window with audio feed from the control center. She was numb with fatigue and continual anxiety. The catalog of medical problems displayed on her workstation seemed like a labyrinth that led to the minotaur of early, evil death. Who was the Greek hero who had killed the minotaur? Catharin hoped for a Canadian hero. Joe, hurry.

  The Ship had orbited over the boundary between night and day. Half of the sunlit side of Green was stained dark red by the penumbra of the shadow of Blue. And the umbra, which on Earth would have been a bullet hole of black, was more like a cannonball’s hole on the eastern limb of the world.

  “Unity Base has a light westerly breeze,” reported one of the stations. Another issued a Downside weather report: the eclipse was likely to have an effect on already unstable atmospheric conditions Downside, and thunderstorms were in the forecast. On impulse, Catharin paid a quick visit to Becca.

  Well on the way to recovery, Becca had been moved to the infirmary in the Medical section. She sat up in bed, alertly watching the telcon window in her room.

  The cannonball’s hole had crawled over the still-nameless continent and covered it with darkness. Catharin could barely find the spot on its southeastern coast where Unity Base was. Becca said, “You know, if Lary’s right about the orbital geometry having been constructed to make eclipses, it sure wasn’t done for beauty’s sake. Not what humans can call beauty, anyway.”

  Around the umbra, the blood-red penumbra enveloped the planet like a huge wound in the world. Catharin shuddered. “It looks awful from space. Why would any intelligent race make this happen?”

  “Maybe they didn’t care what it looked like from space,” said Becca. “But if they remodeled Blue and moved it and Green to where they had just the right geometry for this, they had to have been out in space. And if it was meant to be a show seen from here, maybe they knew to expect the downfall of their civilization. Or the extinction of their species. In other words, I think it’s about the end of the world.”

  An hour later, the shadow moved far enough for the bright eastern limb of Green to shine again. Catharin breathed easier in unexpected relief. The eclipse had disfigured the green world to an astounding degree.

  Then a knock brought her to the door of her laboratory to find Joel standing there with his arms crossed. “Drop whatever you’re doing,” he said. “You need to talk to somebody in the Base. In Bix’s office.” He was in a harsh, abrupt mood that Catharin had never seen before.

  “Why?”

  “Just go.” Joel turned away. His voice sounded choked. That unnerved Catharin as much as the eclipse had.

  The Captain’s office had a holographic telcon display. So although Wing, in Unity Base, had only Catharin’s two-dimensional picture on the window before him, he seemed fully present to her. Except when he suddenly faded and returned, which jarred her frayed nerves. “Carlton, your image is unstable!”

  “It’s the lightning. We have bad weather.”

  “We can see it from up here. Why did you need to talk to me? Is somebody hurt? Is Joe there?”

  Wing seemed to stand right in front of her as he told her that Joe had lost his genius, that he could not make breakthroughs like he had done on Earth, and not for lack of trying. Wing spoke with his empty palms turned up.

  So that was what Joe had meant when he’d said, “I’ll do everything I can.”

  A lightning strike near Unity Base obliterated Wing’s image. Catharin was left staring at the wall behind where he had been, shaking uncontrollably.

  30 Ionbow

  “As you’ve guessed, I can’t help John Mark. Not much, anyway. I’m sorry.”

  So am I! She held her tongue. It had cost Joe something to say that. She remembered when she’d first met him on a telcon window, how different he’d seemed then, incorrigibly arrogant and self-centered.

  “I know who his genetic parents are now. I want to help him more than ever, because part of him is you.” His voice was rough with pain.

  Jolted, Catharin felt a hot-and-cold wash of feeling, and found it hard to answer him. “I believe you,” she whispered.

  Joe seemed to need to think aloud. “Simple repair won’t do it. The shortest jump from where he is to where he’d be healthy isn’t restoring normality, it’s more change toward something more elegant.” He didn’t give her time to digest that statement, immediately adding, “I used to have the Net-name ‘Changer.’ I was too young then to realize change is a two-edged sword and the changer sometimes has to be changed. But now I’ve lost my edge.”

  Joe sat very still. Not like that assessment interview: now, he wasn’t fidgeting at all, as if all he had been through had shocked him into physical calm.

  As much as she was grateful for the privacy and the holography of the telcon in the Captain’s office, Catharin hated the separation between herself and Joe—the new quarantine that his most recent, and most extreme, immersion in alien glop had dictated. It was hard to have him here, as three-dimensional as life, and not be able touch him. “Don’t blame yourself. You’ve been working like a demon on basic research, and it’s helping some people.”

  “Maybe if your psychiatrists took some kind of chemical can opener to my brain, the genie would come out again?”

  She shuddered. They had no way to predict how the brain would react, after stasis, to any kind of invasion. “No, Joe, it might kill the genie. As a researcher, you’re good, and desperately needed.”

  “You’ve got me, then. For what it’s worth.”

  “You’re worth everything in the world to me.”

  He reacted instantly, with a pained smile. “I wish we were in the same world.”

  “So do I,” she murmured. “How are things in yours?”

  “Kay hates being grounded. She’s doing a decent job with the little doctor duties. But she’s joined Raj and Domino in a gripe club. Oh, and Sam’s back in business.” Nunki lay stretched across Joe’s lap. Joe stroked the cat with his strong, elegant fingers, at which Nunki shivered and stretched luxuriously. “Building a new boat—more like a raft—with Alvin’s help. She calls it the Dauntless, and they had a river trial yesterday. At least it didn’t sink.”

  “What’s it made of? They aren’t cannibalizing the Base, are they?”

  “They salvaged wreckage from the crashed shuttle. Alvin’s a first-class welder and fixer-upper. He grew up somewhere in Alabama where the largest body of water was a catfish pond, but he’s gung-ho for a new career as able-bodied sailor.”

  “He does talk like one.” Catharin found it a relief to resort to simple gossip in an overwhelmingly charged conversation.

  “The boat’s keeping people from tearing out each others’ throats—or taking razor blades to their wrists, depending on personality type. Too much has gone wrong, and it’s too damn clear how little we can do about it. But at least there’s the boat for people to invest interest in. How’s Becca?”

  “She’s recovering slowly but steadily, as though her body is finding its way back to its natural balances.”

  “Silke?”

  Vested interest. “Fine, as far as we can tell, but don’t count on too much, Joe. Remember—” Who was she reminding, Joe or herself, about Silke or about John Mark? “Another woman is bearing her. If she lives, she won’t be really be Becca’s and yours.”

  Joe let his hand close lightly on Nunki’s side. Catharin could tell he was taking the pulse of the cat’s soothing purr. “A group of people can think of a kid as everybody’s. There were families like that even on Earth. I told you about my dads and mom and aunt.”

  He had revealed his atypical family background in a private
telcon conversation soon after Catharin’s return to the Ship. At the time, it had startled her. Today it made Catharin think. “Given our precarious state of genetic affairs, it will take the love and labor of many people to bring a child into the world. At best very few of our children will belong to just one couple.” At worst, few children will survive by any means. And in three or four generations there will be none. The end of the world.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? Stasis, supposed suspension of life processes, caused runaway changes in the human organism.” Wheels seemed to turn in his mind. “It’s almost certain to cause a changed society.”

  “Does that appeal to you?”

  He gave her an engaging grin. “I like change for the hell of it. But human society, the way it played out on Earth, needed some big changes.”

  “You had your big chance. You turned it down.”

  “Engineering the end of death was the wrong kind of change,” he said emphatically.

  Finally, she asked him the question that had haunted her for weeks. “Could you have done it, Joe?”

  “Yes. DNA always repairs itself, because accidents always happen, but the mechanisms put in place by evolution only fix a high percentage of the ongoing damages. The accumulated balance accounts for aging and eventual death. I could have gotten it vanishingly close to one hundred percent. Not immortality, but centuries. But it would have shut out mutation and evolution as well. It wouldn’t have been life. More like dynamic stasis at cellular level, continually counteracting the changefulness that’s intrinsic to the genome. The change to end all changes.”

  Then Joe made the kind of connection he was good at doing, closed the circle of his reasoning like a falcon swooping down on its prey. “Rigid, repressive, stagnant societies have to work damn hard at it. Our colony will never have the resources of time and energy to do that. The new biological situation will make the social order mutable. It’ll end up different from how any society on Earth was—or could have been.”

  “I wanted better,” Catharin said sadly. “Not different.”

  He looked away from the telcon and might have been replaying their first conversation in his memory. The side of his face glowed with light flowing in through Medical’s door, which had been flung open for ventilation as the sun set on Unity Mountain. “The kind of better you want is more different than you realize. I wish you could have talked to my Aunt Adrian about the dark roots of the human condition—about sexual inequality and social sexual patterns. The only way I can imagine a rosy human future is if the being is seriously changed.”

  “But to imagine a future at all may be optimistic,” Catharin said in a low voice.

  He nodded. “The more I study what we’ve got now, the more disastrous it looks for reproduction. And you’re getting a new case of cancer or autoimmune disorder or diabetes every week.”

  She loved his honesty, and knew that she could be honest with him. “Bix will have more company when the time comes.”

  “I could have made that different.”

  Aching to hold him, she had to settle for sending words across space to him, which seemed like clumsy, blunt instruments for her feeling. “What would you do if the end of the world was near?”

  His eyes held her gaze for a long moment. “Make love to you.”

  A surge of sexual feeling made Catharin shiver. How strange that sexuality could thrive even in the long shadow of death. Strange but true. “So would I. Damn the distance.”

  “I lose track of time. Is it five more weeks of official quarantine until you can come down or I can go up?”

  “Yes, unless somebody turns green with shiny spots.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “I’ll make a point of not turning green with spots if you’ll make sure the world doesn’t end in the next five weeks.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  It almost felt like the good old days, to be wearing blue coveralls with red piping and working in zero gravity with Joel and others. But Bix was not with them, and rather than a training exercise it was something that Aeon’s designers had never dreamed of, in response to a need that no one had foreseen except maybe in their nightmares.

  The Axis flared as it neared the engines. Bundles of pipe and knots of instrumentation congregated on the inner surface of the Axis. The new pipe had been laid on the surface of all that, retrofitted, with elbow room to spare. Catharin tightened connections between segments of the pipe, using a zerog wrench, with Miguel working not far away. Joel and Chief Engineer Orlov and a couple of junior engineers clustered at the junction where the pipe went into the engine chambers, conferring. Shut down, the huge engines were cool and still.

  With the slow, fluid motion of familiarity with zero gravity, Miguel slid up along the pipe to Catharin’s side. “The interior of these joints will not be thoroughly smooth. Though the vacuum will pull most of it through, some small amount may adhere.”

  While she’d been at Unity Base she had let her hair get longer than ever. A strand had nonetheless worked itself loose from the braid and was floating in front of her eyes. She blew it away. “Then we either flush the pipe or cauterize it. Do you suppose we can arrange some backflow from the ionizing realm—enough to clean the pipe but not reach all the way back into the stasis vaults?”

  “Maybe an engine-rated valve could be installed close to the vaults.” Miguel signaled Joel to come over. Stretching his arms out, Joel soared, rather than sliding along the pipe. Joel loved flying in zero gravity. Today, the work on hand had temporarily relieved him of the burden of his wider responsibilities, and freed him to fly.

  Miguel explained the need for backflow and the possible usefulness of a valve. Joel nodded. “Makes sense. I’ll suggest that somebody—I mean, I’ll put somebody to work on it.” Then he said, “Mama had some idea what I’d be when I grew up. Space pilot, she saw that one coming. But not Ship commander. And not undertaker.”

  The control center hummed with activity, with every station manned and the gallery packed. Yet a respectful relative quiet prevailed. Subdued voices called out status checks.

  The chief engineer’s place was occupied by Orlov when Becca entered the center. Catharin stood to let Becca sit in her own chair at Life Support Systems.

  The Big Picture framed the double planet. In the light of the sun, Blue was half-bright, half-dark; Green was half-dark, half-bright. They looked huge and stately, but Planets Blue and Green were dancing with each other. Each trailed a long banner of light as the Ship’s Intelligence visualized the magnetotails blown back by the wind from the sun. Blue’s dangled toward Green like a dancer’s veil, an intimation of touch across millions of miles of space.

  Orbiting Green and approaching the edge of the veil was the small, bright dot that signified the Ship.

  In the direction of Catharin and Becca, Lary remarked, “Last time, the auroral display looked almost uniformly pale green.”

  Catharin replied, “From Downside, it was brilliant enough to wake up anybody sleeping near a window. How’s their weather?”

  “Partly cloudy, but better than it’s been since the eclipse,” Lary replied cheerily. He was better than he had been in weeks. Joe was succeeding in helping Lary, at least, not with a tour-de-force of scientific genius, but with hard research. Lary’s health had responded positively to a barrage of modified conventional therapies.

  Green’s magnetic field appeared on the Picture as white lines that curved from pole to pole. The veil-like magnetotail of Blue brushed the magnetic lines of Green. The magnetotail channeled streams of particles from Blue into Green’s magnetosphere. The particles looped around the magnetic lines, rapidly corkscrewing toward the north and south polar regions of Green.

  “There it goes!” somebody sang out.

  “Already?” Lary asked. “Three seconds early. It’ll be a big show, all right.”

  In the Picture, the north pole developed a faint, flickering circlet of light.

  As the aurora flared into an emerald crown, Joel or
dered the engines on at ninety percent of full power. A star flared inside the engines, briefly. The Ship ponderously lifted toward a slightly higher orbit aimed through the magnetotail of Blue.

  “Maybe I’m hypersensitive because I was sick,” Becca whispered. “But not only can I feel the engine vibration, I can feel patterns in it. I can tell what kind of shape the engine is in. It’s talking to me.”

  Orlov sat at Engineering, rigid with concentration as he reviewed the information on his console. Orlov had been one of the anomalies in the stasis-aftermath pattern. He was as old as Bix and had been in space nearly as long, yet his health had turned out to be good. Had Catharin revived him, as per the Mission plan, rather than Becca, his health would not have been an issue. He had not forgiven either woman for the decision Catharin had made. But she did not regret it.

  “We’re crossing the magnetotail,” Lary said. “It’s a very impressive particle stream. Little of the radiation can get past the Ship’s insulation, but we’ve lost our normal wavelengths of communication to Unity Base.”

  “That’s okay. They’re all outside watching the sky,” Becca said.

  “The engine chambers are hot,” Orlov reported.

  Joel nodded. “Open the valves. Everybody observe silence for the next minute or so.”

  Even informative audio signals were squelched. The control center had not been so silent since the day Catharin and Bix and Joel had gone in to turn it on just after Starfall, slightly more than a year ago. Becca closed her eyes, as if listening to the engines describe their work of ionizing the dead.

  The Big Picture showed the Ship cutting through the lines of the magnetotail. The charged particles streaming through the magnetotail from Blue to Green poured around the Ship, flowing against the pool of ions released from the engines. The ions glowed. The Ship left a wake of light.

  The Picture wavered with tears in Catharin’s eyes. Blaze of glory.