Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “The, ah, special reaction mass is one hundred percent expended,” reported Flight station.

  “Shut down the engines,” said Joel.

  Murmurs echoed around the center as others registered what the Picture showed. The glowing ionic wake of the Ship was seized and sculpted by the magnetotail of Blue. The radiance took the shape of a shock wave in the magnetotail, stretching toward Green, where it eddied in the magnetic field lines of the green planet and poured toward both of Greens’ poles, creating a world-encompassing bow of faint light.

  “Will you look at that,” Joel said softly. “It’s like a rainbow.”

  “An ionbow,” said Becca.

  The bow made contact with Green’s auroral crown of fire. And at that spot, traces of other colors—pink, yellow, blue—swirled inside the green expanse.

  “Is that a false-color picture?” asked Becca.

  “No. We made a difference in the composition of the aurora,” Miguel answered. “Oxygen ions produce the aurora’s usual green. We injected ionized carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and trace elements in smaller quantities. The atoms that human beings are made of.”

  Joel’s face shone in the colorful soft light. In a quiet but confident voice, he said, “And God made the rainbow for a sign that the flood was over and the waters of destruction would recede, and life would go on.”

  Although broken clouds filled the night sky, Wing elected to go to the promontory an hour before dawn. The first green auroral light appeared in the northern half of the celestial sphere like a thin, gauzy curtain behind the clouds. It brightened into distinct ripples. The clouds developed sharp green edges.

  “I can’t believe this. It gives out enough light to read by,” said Kay.

  “But don’t read. Watch. No camera is going to catch that like the eye can,” Aaron murmured, gazing up at the sky.

  The brilliant green sky had darker green clots of cloud in it. That sky all too well symbolized the mood of the Base for these last days, Wing thought: a pall of electric fear overshadowed everyone, with uglier curdles of animosity, despair, bitterness. His own mood had been as frightened as everyone else’s. He knew how grim the medical situation was turning out to be. Joe had shared that with him in private, in anguish, and in detail.

  Tezi said, “It looks to me like one of those clouds has a tinge of pink.”

  Moved aside by a high-altitude wind, the cloud unveiled a faint blot of pink, blue, and yellow halfway between horizon and zenith, blurred like watercolors. A star shone through the colors. “That’s it!” said Aaron excitedly. “The footprint of the ion release from the ship!”

  The colors intensified, rippling like a thin silk scarf.

  Alvin declared, “Fucking good light show!”

  “Can’t you be even a little reverent?” Kay snapped.

  “Hell no.”

  The testy exchange hardly touched Wing’s inner thoughts. He was mesmerized by the sky, the colors breaking the expanse of ominous auroral green, beautiful and benign light appearing in a haunted sky. Had inhabitants of ancient China ever seen a sight like this, surely they might have called it the Phoenix of lovely colors, the celestial embodiment of benevolence and harmony. Wing, a Christian, saw the ion-rainbow swirl in the green aurora and called it the promise of resurrection.

  31 The Helices Of Crisis

  It pleased Wing that Joe had asked for his company on this excursion. Wing was as fascinated as ever by Green’s eerie twilights. The rules still forbade anyone to venture out during twilight, with or without a companion—but despair over broken genes and shattered futures had loomed so large in Unity Base for so long that no one heeded such rules anymore. Joe and Wing reached the rock-edged pool just at the twilight’s beginning. A red-gold sunset still illuminated the tops of the trees, while the first shafts of blue moonlight shivered in the air.

  “Clear as a bell tonight,” Joe said. “Unlike the last full Blue.” Three weeks ago, at the last full moon, it had rained torrentially, thanks to the weather precipitated by the eclipse. Then Joe said, “Remember the night we walked uphill?”

  “I’ll never forget that.”

  “When we were in the bog full of swampcress—the wok bog—my brain went into a fugue of wild ideas of creatures I wanted to invent. I thought I could see DNA I’ve worked with in the past, hanging in the blue air like a virtual arena. And I thought I could manipulate it.”

  “Without data?”

  “I had my notebook. I checked what I’d entered into it later, though, and none of it made sense. It was a fever dream from being hurt and on painkillers and smelling the bog. But the blue air was just like a virtual arena. When Kay came down in all her glory to give us the news about Blue’s mountains, the shuttle’s contrail looked like DNA on the sky. That made me finally remember the molecules in the blue. I want to see if it happens again.”

  “And if it does?”

  Joe crouched beside the water, looking down but seeming to be looking within himself. “On Earth, I did some of my best work when I was dreaming or walking, then went back to a workstation and fed in the figures. I haven’t felt that kind of inspiration in months. Since the night we crashed. Maybe the ground rules have changed, but the game can still be played. Worth a try, eh?”

  So this was not a simple hour’s leisure, but Joe challenging the demon of his lost creativity. “Of course,” said Wing.

  The pool was flat and bright as a mirror. Wing thought of the beneficent effects of mirrors in Asian folklore; it had been thought that mirrors drive away demons. He fervently hoped that it would be so tonight. Then, in the back of his mind, he prayed about it.

  Joe paced back and forth. “Good thing it’s not overcast. I’ve got my nerves all worked up for this. If I had to put it off, I’d get cold feet.”

  “Yes. The twilight can be dangerous.”

  “That and part of me still doesn’t want this to work, because if it does, I’m committed to work on medical problems the rest of my life. Same old quandary. I don’t want to lose my life as I know it, don’t want to change that much,” Joe said dourly. “Not even if the alternatives are even worse for everybody else.”

  Wing sympathized. If someone had asked him, more than a year ago, whether he would volunteer to devote himself to study alien plants, and be torn away from his family, his faith community, and his religious calling in the Sixth Tier, he would have politely but firmly declined.

  Joe alternately tinkered with the notebook and watched for the moon to rise over the fern trees. He radiated tension. Yet, he wasn’t as self-absorbed as Wing might have expected. He stopped to look over Wing’s shoulder as Wing examined small plants in crannies in the rocks, misted by the waterfall.

  “I’m looking for flowers,” Wing explained. “If flowering plants arose and declined in the long life of Green, some flowers might linger as small relic populations, like Catharin’s purple-footed drakeflies.”

  The dusk evolved into a magenta mixture of blue moonlight and red setting sunlight, making it impossible to discern the small parts of the plants. Wing stretched out on the mossy hillside beside the pool. He jumped up when he found it surprisingly warm. More gingerly, he settled down again.

  Joe drew into himself, working with his notebook. Wing saw a calmer and more pleasant man than he had first met on the Starship. Joe was facing the most painful question of his life with a kind of ragged grace. Wing approved.

  The sun set, and its red light withdrew from the sky. The blue around them intensified. Joe stayed motionless and silent save for his wand tapping the touchscreen of his notebook.

  The hurricane moon rose above the fern trees, pouring abundant blue light onto the pool. It made the hard shapes of the rocks soft and indistinct to the eye, and gave the soft form of water an uncanny hard luster.

  Wing felt strangely close to God, mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the frightening and fascinating mystery. On this green world with that blue one in the night sky, there was plentiful and potent mystery to contempla
te. For the first time since stasis, Wing did not regret having been revived for this place and time. Even if Joe failed, disaster unfolded, and humanity died out with Wing’s own generation, Wing would still be glad that he had met the wonder of these worlds.

  “I can visualize what I need to,” Joe said suddenly. “I just think about it and then let my mind wander, and it’s there. There. A double helix.” Joe pointed at thin blue air. “The Ship sent me an analysis of Silke’s DNA. That was a small mountain of data. But I must have somehow memorized it. Now I can see it. And—Carl—”

  Joe’s voice was so fraught with feeling that Wing sat up, alarmed.

  “It took me days to realize that there was something wrong with John Mark. Now—”

  Dismay knotted itself like a cold, tangled wire in the pit of Wing’s stomach. “Do you see something wrong?”

  “No. Everything’s right. She’ll be tall and slender, with auburn hair and blue eyes. Carl, part of her is me! I know my own genome pretty well. I can tell the difference between Becca’s genes and mine in Silke! It’s almost like seeing myself in a magic mirror. Not completely me. But not a stranger either.”

  Wing sensed that it was a moment for the right word or none. He chose to say, “It is not always terrible to be changed, Joe.”

  Joe’s intake of breath told Wing that he’d gotten the point.

  “Can you see John Mark?” Wing suggested, aware that twilight would not last indefinitely.

  Joe physically turned around, as though the other child’s genome occupied its own place in the blue air. Joe’s face took on a frown: the expression of a man evaluating a subtle and thorny problem.

  Joe alone could see the molecules of the boy’s life and death arrayed in the twilight. To Wing’s amazement, Joe reached up to pluck something invisible out of the thin air; he moved it a few inches to the side, with an air of infinite precision.

  It was the earliest hours of the Ship’s morning, and Joel lay in bed sleeping badly when he got the call he dreaded. “Commander, please come to the hospital.”

  Joel dressed in a haze of sick dread and had his hand on the door before it penetrated the haze the caller had not been Dr. Pei. It had been the clipped voice of Srivastava.

  The molecular biology center chief met Joel in the hospital lobby. Srivastava had on the crisp white coat that he always wore—Joel could imagine him stone-cold dead and just as immaculate—but part of his black hair stuck out as though he’d slept on it. “What’s up?” Joel asked.

  Srivastava waved Joel into the hospital elevator. “The Ship has enormous computing power, and as much of it as could be spared has been used in the effort to find the cause and cure of the boy’s illness. The Medical Intelligence ran through gene substitutions, modeling the outcomes in the patient.”

  The elevator glided past the floor where the pediatric unit was located. Joel realized that he had been holding his breath. Since the door wasn’t opening on the pediatric unit after all, he let it out.

  Srivastava went on, “If we change this allele to that, will the boy get better? If not this one, the next? Express this gene? Suppress that one? But the human genome is complex beyond even artificial intelligence like we have here. It has been like the earliest computers programmed to play chess, which did poorly because they examined every possible move after every possible move, an impossible number of considerations. We lacked a heuristic way to expedite the process. All of our existing heurisms are based on the genetic mistakes known to medicine on Earth, and what we have here is an unprecedented set.”

  “Has somebody come up with a new heuristic code?”

  “No. It seems that the Intelligence is being guided by a master.”

  “Joe Toronto?”

  “He rang up four hours ago and interrupted the substitution routine. He has been sending up a set of exactly defined specifications for gene therapy, and having the Intelligence model the results.” Srivastava pushed open the door to the Molecular Biology Center.

  Joel did a double-take: at three o’clock in the Ship’s morning, the center swarmed with people, and every workstation window in the place was alight with imagery, with holovisuals in the air all over the place. “So the gene genius thinks he’s gotten his knack back?”

  “There.” Srivastava pointed to a window displaying a geodesic framework of lines, with a complex array of colored dots packed within the frame. “It is a virus being designed to infect cells with a cure. My people are so convinced that Toronto is onto something that they have started to produce the virus.”

  It finally sank in that this might be good news. Joel demanded, “Are you telling me there’s a cure for John Mark?”

  “The Intelligence is modeling the outcome of the genes to be delivered by the viral couriers. Changes in the patient’s metabolism and other cellular activities are played out. See?” Medical diagrams and figures unintelligible to Joel scrolled down the window. All of a sudden, Srivastava abandoned his factual rundown to exclaim, “My God, the AI thinks it will really work!”

  Joel had been too beleaguered by dire problems for too long to believe it. Joel said flatly, “It can’t be true that he’s that good again. If he ever was.”

  Srivastava waved his hands in a gesture that matched the state of his hair: sprung loose from the usual composure. “I heard about that guy on Earth. Inside the scientific community, he had a reputation as a tinkerer. One who would undertake first this showy project and then that one, whatever caught his fancy. A genius, yes, but one without much staying power. I would have expected less from him than this, even if he had been still at the peak of his ability.”

  In the hubbub of voices in the center, one got Joel’s attention. “Maturation modeling—” Joel turned automatically.

  He’d seen the Intelligence’s maturation modeling of John Mark before. It had bleakly fascinated him. The Intelligence had aged the sick baby to a sicker child, one with patchy skin, a misshapen head, and slack jaw. Thus the Intelligence had unsparingly predicted ongoing illness and developmental problems, followed by death in late childhood.

  The boy visualized in the window stood with his back to Joel. He might have been six years old. Naked, he was well-formed, his skin the color of well-stirred cafe au lait with none of the sick patchiness in the images Joel had seen before.

  Joel walked closer. Two technicians quickly moved out of his way.

  The boy turned around. The Intelligence must have been modeling this age of the boy with these new genes for the very first time; the image moved slowly. Slow motion gave the boy an uncanny gracefulness.

  The face that turned toward Joel transfixed him. Brown eyes. Regular features. Something about the contour of his eyes and cheekbones, and the alert cast of boy’s expression, was familiar. Joel felt goosebumps form on his skin.

  The boy resembled Catharin.

  When Joel woke Catharin up, he was struck by how much her intent face resembled the boy’s, until he told her the news. Then she broke down, crying on his shoulder, shaking so hard that he had to brace himself as he held her.

  Joel found himself remembering the ionbow painted on the Big Picture a few weeks before, improbable and marvelous. “It’ll be all right,” he murmured to Catharin. “Death isn’t the end. Life is.”

  Wing discovered Joe in the Penthouse, sleeping the sound sleep of the innocent, or the redeemed.

  A gleeful commotion from the patio was faintly audible even from here. Everyone whom Eddy had fended off from distracting Joe at his vital work, all of whom Aaron had finally ordered out of Medical, had congregated on the patio to celebrate. With water, beer, and Wimm’s new vintage of wine, they had toasted Joe as well as the moon, sun, stars, Silke, the Ship, Green, and assorted indigenous fauna. Then they started dancing, and most were still at it.

  What Joe had done was received by Unity Base as a miracle.

  Relaxing on his own bunk, Wing pondered this. He felt inclined to see Joe’s astounding achievement as less of a marvel and more of a natural
outcome of Joe’s labors of the past few months. Inspiration, perspiration, and consummation were the natural order of human success. Gifted people might skip the second term, perspiration. The naturally brilliant can find ways to avoid having to labor as long and hard as their fellows. That was similar to how the beautiful often fail to cultivate their personalities. In either case they were impoverished in the midst of their abundance.

  Not Joe’s scientific breakthrough, but rather his change of heart, Wing found miraculous. From being a man who shied away from perspiration, and disavowed commitment to the common good, Joe had become a man who threw himself into the fiery furnace of labor for the good of others for weeks on end. And at the last, even Joe’s wild genius had willed good. For that, Wing thanked a slender blue-eyed girl who had yet to be born. Silke had shown Joe change with a human face. She, unborn child and woman yet to be, had convinced Joe that change, even change reaching into the core of his being, did not have to be alien and awful.

  32 Spring Tide

  Speaking to Catharin and Joel over a private telcon link to the molecular biology center, Joe sounded less brusque than he had just fifteen minutes earlier while addressing the conference. Of course: he didn’t need to assert his rank, as had been the case with his fellow scientists.

  He wasn’t editing his remarks as much, either. “John Mark is human. Same species as us. But a new variety. He’s got traits that no human ever had before.”

  He had given Catharin fair warning about this, but put in straightforward words, it still stunned her. She managed to say, “Subtle ones, I hope.”

  “Very subtle. I wasn’t showing off. But I didn’t point the fine details out to Srivastava and company because it might rattle some cages.”

  “Mine included,” Catharin murmured.

  “Why did you do it?” Joel asked.