by C. Gockel
“The natural genome is jerry-rigged, improvised by natural selection rather than built by logical design. Restoring the jerry-rigging scrambled by stasis was impossible in practice. I had to find more elegant mechanisms than some of the ones evolution cobbled together in the first place. I know it’s his humanity we’re talking about. And he’s your child,” he added, addressing both of them with more empathy than Catharin would have thought conceivable a year or a thousand light-years ago. Her throat tightened. Our child. He cares. Strange that such simple facts could be devastatingly moving.
Joel sat with his chin propped on his fist, keeping his emotions to himself. “Sometimes life says change or die.”
“Captain, may I give you some advice about the situation we’re in?”
It was the first time Catharin had heard Joe call Joel anything other than Atlanta.
“I’d welcome it,” Joel said.
They sounded like a captain and a chief scientist with guarded but genuine respect for each other.
“John Mark won’t be unique for long. Reproductive roulette is the name of the game now. A rare couple may go off in the woods and conceive a child—” the corner of Joe’s mouth twitched ironically. “But it’s still likely to take medical and scientific intervention to bring the child to term. Any child from here on out. God only knows what the social ripple effects will be. I’m glad dealing with that isn’t my job.” It’s yours, Captain, was implied. Joe went on, “That day on the river, Carlton Wing survived the tidal wave only because he knew to point the bow of the canoe into it, and he and Tezi had the nerve to stay in position. I’m a scientist, not a prophet—but I think the situation we’re in is similar. I advise you to steer our colony accurately and unflinchingly.” Or see it wrecked.
Joel evidently understood. A sheen of sweat had appeared on his brow. “Can I count on you to help with the science?”
Joe nodded, with the somber air of a man reenlisting in the armed forces in time of war. His image was holographic, an illusion that made him look close enough to touch, his mood tangible enough to feel. On impulse, with a surge of empathy for Joe, Catharin said, “But it’s different in an important way from facing the tidal wave. The time frame is much longer. There will be time to rest. And play. Joe has damn well earned the right to play—and I might add, that’s a well-known way to keep scientific creativity fresh—but he might need some of the Ship’s research facilities.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.” Joel asked Joe, “What do you have in mind?”
For a moment, Joe looked flummoxed at the unexpected turn of topic—or at the fact that it was Catharin who had turned the topic that way. Then wheels in his mind started turning. “I’ve always wanted to make a unicorn.”
Aside, Joel asked Catharin, “Could he do that?”
“Safe bet. But how would the horse feel about it, Joe?”
To Catharin’s joy, he took the question seriously. “Metabolic adjustments are dangerously tricky, but a horn is a lot more foolproof. The animal would be very unlikely to end up sick. A delicate physique is even easier. It’s not genetic at all. Horses conceived and raised on the Moon ended up small and delicate. The trickiest part would be integrating appropriate behavior into the beast, so it didn’t have reflexes that cause it to hurt itself, or inappropriately injure its friends. But I know a lot about the plasticity of behavior at the genetic level. It’s important for horses to have a herd to feel all’s right with the world, though. So how about a unicorn garden in the lower-gravity realms near the Axis?”
Amazing how Joe had upped the ante from unicorn, singular, somewhere, to a whole herd of them in the prize real estate in Aeon.
Joel’s chin lifted, and he stirred in his chair. “Could you figure out a way to give people radiation-proof skin? Eyes that see into the infrared?”
“We could have done it on Earth, and it would have facilitated deep-space exploration,” Joe answered immediately. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t economically rewarding enough.”
“I wondered about that.” Joel had always been a man with imagination, and now he was thinking ahead into their new future. “We’ve got the whole rest of a solar system to explore here. And old-world economics don’t matter.”
A blue outline flashed around the screen. The research center’s Intelligence wanted the communications link back for uploading data from Unity Base.
Joel told Joe, “Earlier, I thanked you on behalf of the hope you’ve given everybody. I thank you personally too. For what you’ve done for John Mark. For what you’ve given me.”
When Joe’s image faded, Catharin and Joel were left in private. And Joel’s facade of equanimity melted. He put his head in his hands. “I didn’t expect this.”
“I didn’t expect any of this. None of what happened since we left Earth. Not the bad, and not the good.” She rubbed his back.
“Did I do okay?”
“Yes, Captain.” Patting his back, she took her hand away.
Joel smiled at her. “Don’t miss your shuttle down to the Base. You’ve earned a chance to play too.”
“I will. They’re going to watch for migrating Green-seals, and I’m invited to be one of the observers.”
“Lady, watching fish wasn’t what I meant.”
To his surprise, Joe had just gotten what he had always wanted: permission to play. Ideas bubbled in his brain. For the next generation of space explorers, practical, radiation-resistant skin would be an inarguable plus—and the properties could be designed as decorative tiger stripes. He didn’t know what Catharin thought about his resurgent itch to play with human genes. She’d gone inscrutable on the telcon after Joel brought up making modifications to people. In all likelihood, she was saving her opinion for their first hour of privacy.
He went outside. In the loading dock of Unity Base, Sam Houston was loading bulky equipment into three jeeps. “Need a hand?”
“Have at it! Is she coming back?”
“On the shuttle later this morning.”
As Joe hefted an instrument package onto an already high pile of equipment in the back of one of the jeeps, he remembered meeting Catharin for the first time, and her well-honed determination to reconstruct civilization in the sunlight of another star. On one hand, there would be a future. On the other hand, the foreseeable future was fraught with genetic damage and painstaking repair, with incalculable societal ramifications. And there were no more hands than that. The human race at Green would not escape sea-change. Catharin’s hopes had been dead on arrival, whether or not she’d admitted that to herself yet.
Nobody—not the scientists, not the Vanguard, not the colonists still in stasis—had gotten what they bargained for. Some got much worse, others far better, and some a very different prize than what they’d expected on the other side of the stars.
Joe was starting to feel like one of the lucky ones.
Sam noticed. As she meticulously secured Joe’s contributions to the jeep’s cargo, Sam chortled and told him, “Tall, blond, and striking really is the type you go for!”
Wildly mixed feelings would be easier to sort out while she was still on the Ship than while being welcomed back to Unity Base. Catharin detoured to Outtown’s plaza.
As a doctor, it unnerved her that John Mark had subtle changes from the human norm. The sick boy had been a dismaying mirror for her. The well child was an uncanny one.
Shrubs framed wide white sidewalks. Water danced in a fountain, spurting up from the mouth of a fantastic brass fish. The fish reminded her of Joe. He could make fantasies real. He still had a streak of unruly wild genius, along with a new capability for hard work and taking responsibility. The combination was more compelling to Catharin than she would have thought possible.
Joe didn’t know it, but she was planning to up the ante on him. She reached into the jacket pocket, checking to make sure Miranda’s ring was still there. It felt smooth, heavy, and cool.
Unexpectedly and soberingly, the ring reminded Catharin of her
original purpose. She had meant to help carry the forged, completed wisdom of civilization to the stars. For a long time, she’d been too busy beating death back to worry about that. Now she realized why she’d made a beeline to the plaza to do her thinking. It reflected her old dream—and told her that it was still just a dream. Even with a breathable atmosphere and landscaping, the plaza was strikingly clean and empty. And the longest stretches of sidewalks revealed a disconcerting upward curvature to match Aeon’s spin-gravity. The plaza wasn’t so much the heart of a living city as a template for a future inspired by the past.
The ancient European Renaissance had segued into the chaos of Reformation. But people in Earth’s twenty-first century had revived Renaissance ideals. Two of those idealists were the parents who had given Catharin Firenze for a middle name and instilled in her the hope of a new golden age, civilization re-created with perfection it had never had in the past.
Any such hope would almost certainly be wagered away in the crap shoot of a wildly unpredictable future on Green. Catharin’s personal mission was a lost cause. It had been ever since she was revived for the first time at Planet Zero. She wondered if she could live happily with that failure boxed up and stored away deep inside of her.
The gardeners had succeeded in making healthy-looking marigolds grow beside the walkway in a rough ribbon of green and gold. But one of the dewy, new-budded marigolds was blue, obviously a mutant. Startled, Catharin kneeled to study it. The petals looked normal, a bit filmy for a marigold, but symmetrical. But as blue as sky.
Some of the fringes of stasis-induced change were tiny and harmless. But they could turn up anywhere, like omens, lest anyone forget the grim truth. Catharin bowed her head, nearly brought to tears by the little flower.
A gardener appeared at her side, looking concerned. “Doctor, are you all right?”
“Fine.” She got to her feet. “I was admiring your sport.”
His face fell when he saw the mutant marigold. Those on gardening duty were sensitized to the genetic debacle; it manifested itself in their hands every day.
Something clicked in Catharin’s mind. People weren’t marigolds, or horses, who had to accept being changed and uncomprehendingly live with it. Humans could embrace life even without arms—and make a society work even if the biological fibers that tied one generation to the next were unpredictable and brittle. People didn’t have to be blind to the unexpected, or bound by fear of it. “It’s pretty. With any luck, you might develop a whole new kind of marigold from this one,” she said to the gardener.
On her way out of the plaza, she paused beside the fish fountain. The basin contained clear water, plus a few coins—souvenirs of Earth that had turned up in the recesses of pockets and boxes, useless as currency in a city-ship without money, tossed into the water for luck. They were in for luck, all right—a tidal wave of it, and not preferentially good luck, either. Yet, the human race here might face the wave of change and survive. It all depended on how well and how wisely they steered. And that would be Catharin’s goal from now on. She would do her best. And Joe would help, and not reluctantly, not anymore.
She wanted to see Joe again, touch him, hold him, so urgently that the yearning was a pleasurable pain.
The thump-thump-thump of the Starhawk’s rotors echoed off the riverbanks, fading as the helicopter departed toward the drop-off points for the other three teams of spotters, farther downriver. Joe and Catharin checked to be sure they’d debarked with everything they needed: binoculars, two-way, ground blanket, hats to ward off the noon sun. And each other. Catharin said, “Well, we’re alone at last.”
She looked extraordinarily good in her well-fitting field clothes. Her shirt had buttons, not buttoned up as far as usual. When she moved, he Joe saw something of the curves of her breasts. He wanted more of her so much that he suddenly felt breathless. He was more than ready to make love to her. But maybe not on the river’s scratchy banks, and definitely not with spotters positioned on land and water and in the air. “Not alone enough.”
They climbed the nearby hill. The river rolled by below within steep banks thirty feet high, vivid green with worms that didn’t think the time had come to duck.
“Everybody in position?” came the voice of Sam on the two-way, blaring with enthusiasm.
Teams One, Two, and Three—which was Catharin and Joe—and Four, consisting of Domino and Aaron beside the Starhawk, which had landed on a bluff, reported in. Kite was aloft; Becca’s voice was clear on the two-way as she reported her position, flying up the coastline toward the estuary. It was the same route she had taken the day she took Joe up. Wing rode in the airplane with Becca today, intent on viewing his old nemesis, the wave, from a safer perspective.
“Alvin just cast off the bow line. We’re going out into the current,” Sam informed them all. She and Alvin were aboard the Dauntless, well up the river, where the wave should crest at less than a foot high. Their homemade instruments and meters dangled off the sides of the raft like so many fishing lines. “Ten minutes and counting until the tide rolls off the sea.”
“We’ll be there,” said the soprano voice of Kite.
Catharin and Joe spread a cloth on the ground and settled down for a comfortable wait. Catharin turned off the two-way transmitter to speak without being overheard. “Joe, I brought something for you.” She placed something small and heavy in his palm.
It was a man’s wedding ring, plain but lustrous, old gold. Startled, Joe said, “You came from Earth prepared.”
“Yes, but not that prepared. It was a last-minute gift from a friend.” She smiled slightly, the corners of her mouth curving up, but her face had a cast of fierce seriousness. “It’s yours if you want it. So am I.”
For weeks, Joe had wondered if a moment like this would come up. And if it did, whether he would run for his life—or give up the relentless independence he’d prized ever since he left home, like a snake sloughing its old skin. He lobbed the decision back to her. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Catharin Gault?”
With a flick of her head, she said, “I’m finally changing my name. From here on out, I’ll be Catharin Firenze.”
Ever since she’d told him about her middle name, it had secretly fascinated him. Now, it tipped Joe out of indecision. He closed his hand around the ring. “I traveled lighter than you did. What was in my heart and head was all I brought. I could invent a nice plasmid ring for you, to specify an interesting genetic trait in future generations.” He waited for her to explode.
She said, “Deal.” The syllable resonated in a vast and unexpected space of permission. Joe was so astonished that words failed him. Laughing, she leaned closer to him and stroked the bridge of his nose with her finger. Joe took her hand and kissed her palm.
The two-way said, “Team Three, you’re supposed to be paying attention to the river.” Domino’s tone was barbed. Catharin blushed an attractive shade of shell-pink.
“The worm clock says it’s soon,” Tezi Young reported on the two-way. The banks of the river had begun to turn pale, from the waterline up.
The hurricane moon rode high in the sky, almost new, a thin curved blue wire. It was a world that somebody had remade after their idea of grandeur. Maybe the blue world hadn’t minded being remodeled. Joe suspected that worlds, like DNA, wanted to change.
Blue and the new sun pulled together, exerting the full force of spring tide on Green. The waters of Green flared up in response. Becca’s voice came over the two-way. “People, you’ve got a tidal bore coming.”
Wing said, “I can see it folding out of the water in the mouth of the river. From here, it is magnificent.”
“Plain as day. We’re following it,” Becca said.
“Look for beasties,” Sam reminded on the two-way.
“There’s Kite.” Catharin pointed. In the distance, the plane circled, the sun glancing off its long wings.
Becca said, “We see something. Five, six—no? You’re right, Carl. Make it two or three, the
water’s so clear we can see their shadows on the bottom of the river. Elongated shapes. Maybe they’re Joe’s seals. They seem to be riding the surge about a hundred yards behind the crest. I won’t fly lower and scare ‘em, but the cameras are on telephoto. We’ve got an image.”
“Do they look like aliens?” asked the scratchy voice of Alvin, first mate on the Dauntless.
“I can see five aliens from here,” Aaron said dryly.
“He’s right,” Catharin murmured. “We really are the aliens.”
“Our children won’t be,” Joe said.
Catharin gave him an intent look with her green eyes, then nodded. “So be it.”
“That flange Joe described is wider than I thought, and undulating,” Wing reported. “They swim like manta rays.”
Kite flew along the river, chasing the tidal bore. Layered under the drone of its engine, Joe heard a sound like distant surf, a sigh that grew louder and louder. He took Catharin’s hand and pulled her up beside him to watch the river. Its steep banks glistened greenish-gray. The worms had all taken refuge in their holes.
Catharin squeezed Joe’s hand. The feel of her fingers, slender but strong, laced with his, gave him a shock of delight.
The big wave was not as ugly as Joe had seen in his nightmares. It looked stately as it approached, a graceful mountain of clear, light blue water. The wave passed by, raising the whole river in one mighty surge. Its voice swelled into a resounding hiss, with a clatter of rocks at the wave’s skirts. Cheering and applause sounded from the nearest other spotting position. Catharin waved her hat. The wind from the sea blew a few loose strands of her long hair across her face, which was lit with an expression of delight. Joe had the ring in his free hand, holding it tightly. It meant her, he thought. She wanted to be his in a way no woman ever had been, and he was going to be hers. Scary thought. But attractive too, like the wave.
In the wave’s wake, the river ran twenty feet higher, deep green in color, fringed with rich foam. The river’s surface tossed and shimmered.