“Two more people waiting to see you, boss,” says Coby’s voice on the intercom. This also is mildly unusual, Centaur is a healthy ship. The Peruvian oceanographer comes in, shamefacedly confessing to insomnia. He is religiously opposed to drugs, but Aaron persuades him to try an alpha regulator. Next is Kawabata, the hydroponics chief. He is bothered by leg spasms. Aaron prescribes quinine, and Kawabata pauses to chat enthusiastically about the state of the embryo cultures he has been testing.
“Ninety percent viability after ten-year cryostasis,” he grins. “We are ready for that planet. By the way, Doctor, is Lieutenant Tighe recovering so well? I see you are allowing him freedom.”
Aaron is too startled to do more than mumble. The farm chief cuts him off with an encomium on chickens, an animal Aaron loathes, and departs.
Shaken, Aaron goes to look at Tighe. The sensor lights outside his door indicate all pickups functioning: pulse regular, EEG normal if a trifle flat. He watches the alpha-scope break into a weak REM, resume again. The printouts themselves are outside. Aaron opens the door.
Tighe is lying on his side, showing his poignant Nordic profile, deep in drugged sleep. He doesn’t look over twenty: rose-petal flush on the high cheekbones, a pale gold cowlick falling over his closed eyes. The prototype Beautiful Boy who lives forever with his white aviator’s silk blowing in the wind of morning. As Aaron watches, Tighe stirs, flings up an arm with the IV taped to it, and shows his whole face, the long blond lashes still on his cheek.
It is now visible that Tighe is a thirty-year-old boy with an obscene dent where his left parietal arch should be. Three years back, Tiger Tighe had been their first—and so far, only—serious casualty. A stupid accident; he had returned safely from a difficult EVA and nearly been beheaded by a loose oxy tank while unsuiting in the free-fall shaft.
As if sensing Aaron’s presence Tighe smiles heartbreakingly, his long lips still promising joy. The undamaged Tighe had been the focus of several homosexual friendships, a development provided for in Centaur’s program. Like so much else that has brought us through sane, Aaron reflects ruefully. He had never been one of Tighe’s lovers. Too conscious of his own graceless, utilitarian body. Safer for him, the impersonal receptivity of Solange. Which was undoubtedly also in the program, Aaron thinks. Everything but Lory.
Tighe’s mouth is working, trying to say something in his sleep.
“Hoo, huh.” The speech circuits hunt across the wastelands of his ruined lobe. “Huhhh . . . Huh-home.” His lashes lift, the sky-blue eyes find Aaron.
“It’s all right, Tiger,” Aaron lies, touches him comfortingly. Tighe makes saliva noises and fades back into sleep, his elegant gymnast’s body turning a slow arabesque in the low gee. Aaron checks the catheters and goes.
The closed door opposite is Lory’s. Aaron gives it a brotherly thump and looks in, conscious of the ceiling scanner. Lory is on the bunk reading. A nice, normal scene.
“Tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred,” he tells her. “The wrap-up. You okay?”
“You should know.” She grimaces cheerfully at the biomonitor pickups.
Aaron squints at her, unable to imagine how he can voice some cosmic, lifelong suspicion with that scanner overhead. He goes out to talk to Coby.
“Is there any conceivable chance that Tiger could have got to where an intercom screen could have picked him up?”
“Absolute negative. See for yourself,” Coby says, loading tape spools into the Isolation pass-through. His eyes flick up at Aaron. “I didn’t bugger them.”
“Did I say that?” Aaron snaps. But he’s guilty, they both know it; because it was Coby who was Frank Foy’s other important case, five years back. Aaron had caught his fellow doctor making and dealing dream-drugs. Aaron sighs. A miserable business. There had been no question of “punishing” Coby, or anyone else on Centaur, for that matter; no one could be spared. And Coby is their top pathologist. If and when they get back to Earth he will face—who knows what? Meanwhile he has simply gone on with his job; it was then he had started calling Aaron “boss.”
Now Aaron sees a new animation flickering behind Coby’s clever-ape face. Of course—the planet. Never to go back. Good, Aaron thinks. He likes Coby, he relishes the unquenchable primate ingenuity of the man.
Coby is telling him that the Drive chief Gomulka has come in with a broken knuckle, refusing to see Aaron. Coby pauses, waiting for Aaron to get the implication. Aaron gets it, unhappily; a physical fight, the first in years.
“Who did he hit?”
“One of the Russkies, if I had to guess.”
Aaron nods wearily, pulling in the tapes he has to check. “Where’s Solange?”
“Over with Xenobiology, checking out what you’ll need to analyze that thing. Oh, by the way, boss”—Coby gestures at the service roster posted on their wall—“you missed your turn on the shit detail. Last night was Common Areas. I got Nan to swap you for a Kitchen shift next week, maybe you can talk Berryman into giving us some real coffee.”
Aaron grunts and takes the tapes back to Interview to start the comparator runs. It is a struggle to keep awake while the spools speed through the discrepancy analyzer, eliciting no reaction. His own and Lory’s are all nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal-all variation within normative limits. Aaron goes out to the food dispenser, hoping that Solange will show. She doesn’t. Reluctantly he returns to run Tighe’s.
Here, finally, the discrepancy indicator stirs. After two hours of input the analyzer has summed a deviation bordering on significance; it hovers there as Aaron continues the run. Aaron is not surprised; it’s the same set of deviations Tighe has shown all week, since his problematical contact with the alien. A slight, progressive flattening of vital function, most marked in the EEG. Always a little less theta. Assuming theta correlates with memory, Tighe is losing capacity to learn.
Aren’t we all, Aaron thinks, wondering again what actually happened in Gamma corridor. The scout ship China Flower had been berthed there with the ports sealed, attended by a single guard. Boring duty, after two weeks of nothing. The guard had been down by the stern end having a cup of brew. When he turned around, Tighe was lying on the deck up by the scout’s cargo hatch and the port was open. Tighe must have come out of the access ramp right by the port; he had been EVA team-leader before his accident, it was a natural place for him to wander to. Had he been opening or closing the lock when he collapsed? Had he gone inside and looked at the alien, had the thing given him some sort of shock? Nobody can know.
Aaron tells himself that in all likelihood Tighe had simply suffered a spontaneous cerebral seizure as he approached the lock. He hopes so. Whatever happened, Yellaston ordered the scout ship to be undocked and detached from Centaur on a tether. And Tighe’s level of vitality is on the downward trend, day after day. Unorthodox, unless there is unregistered midbrain deterioration. Aaron can think of nothing to do about it. Maybe better so.
Bone-weary now, he packs up and forces himself to go attend to Tighe’s necessities. Better say good-night to Lory, too.
She is still curled on her bunk like a kid, deep in a book. Centaur has real books in addition to the standard microfiches; an amenity.
“Finding some good stuff?”
She looks up, brightly, fondly. The scanner will show that wholesome sisterly grin.
“Listen to this, Arn.” She starts reading something convoluted; Aaron’s ears adjust only in time to catch the last of it.
“. . . Grow upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die. . . . It’s very old, Arn. Tennyson.” Her smile is private.
Aaron nods warily, acknowledging the earnest Victorian. He has had enough tiger and ape and he will not get drawn into another dialogue with Lory, not with that scanner going.
“Don’t stay up all night.”
“Oh, this rests me,” she tells him happily. “It’s an escape into truth. I used to read and read on the way back.”
Aaron flinches at the thought of that solitary trip. Dear Lo
ry, little madwoman.
“Night.”
“Good night, dear Arn.”
He gets himself into his bunk, grumbling old curses at Centaur’s selection board. Pedestrian clots, no intuition. Lory the non-sex-object, sure. Barring the fact that Lory’s prepubescent body is capable of unhinging the occasional male with the notion that she contains some kind of latent sexual lightning, some secret supersensuality lurking like hot lava in the marrow of her narrow bones. In their years on Earth, Aaron had watched a series of such idiots breaking their balls in the attempt to penetrate to Lory’s mythical marrow. Luckily none on Centaur, so far.
But that wasn’t the main item the selection board missed. Aaron sighs, lying in the dark. He knows the secret lightning in Lory’s bones. Not sex, would that it were. Her implacable innocence—what was the old phrase, a fanatic heart. A too-clear vision of good, a too-sure hatred of evil. No love lost, in between. Not much use for living people. Aaron sighs again, hearing the frightening condemnation in her unguarded voice. Has she changed? Probably not. Probably doesn’t matter, he tells himself; how could it matter that chance has put Lory’s head between us and whatever’s on that planet? It’s all a technical problem, air and water and bugs and so on. . . .
Effortfully he pushes the thoughts away. I’ve been cooped up here twenty days with her and Tighe, he tells himself; I’m getting deprivation fantasies. As sleep claims him his last thought is of Captain Yellaston. The old man must be getting low on his supplies.
II
. . . Immensely tall, eternally noble, the woman paces through gray streaming clouds. In rituals of grief she moves, her heavy hair bound with dark jewels; she gestures to her head, her heart, a mourning queen pacing beside a leaden sea. Chained beasts move slowly at her heels, the tiger stepping with sad majesty, the ape mimicking her despair. She plucks the bindings from her hair in agony, it streams on the icy wind. She bends to loose the tiger, urging it to freedom. But the beast form wavers and swells, thins out; the tiger floats to ghostly life among the stars. The ape is crouching at her feet; she lays her long fingers on its head. It has turned to stone. The woman begins a death chant, breaking her bracelets one by one beside the sea. . . .
Aaron is awake now, his eyes streaming with grief. He hears his own throat gasping, Uh—uhh—uhh, a sound he hasn’t made since—since his parents died, he remembers sharply. The pillow is soaked. What is it? What the hell is doing it? That was Lory’s goddamn ape and tiger, he thinks. Stop it! Quit.
He stumbles up, finds it’s the middle of the night, not morning. As he douses his face he is acutely aware of a direction underfoot, an invisible line leading down through the hull to the sealed-up scouter, to the alien inside. Lory’s alien in there.
All right. Face it.
He sits on his bunk in the dark. Do you believe in alien telepathic powers, Dr. Kaye? Is that vegetable in there broadcasting on a human wavelength, sending out despair?
Possible, I suppose, Doctor. Anything—almost anything—is possible.
But the tissue samples, the photos. They showed no differentiated structure, no neural organization. No brain. It’s a sessile plant-thing. Like a cauliflower, like a big lichen; like a bunch of big grapes, she said. All it does is metabolize and put out a little bioluminescence. Discrete cellular potentials cannot generate anything complex enough to trigger human emotions. Or can they? No, he decides. We can’t do it ourselves, for god’s sake. And it’s not anything physical like subsonics, not with the vacuum between. And besides, if it is doing this, Lory couldn’t possibly have got back here sane. Nearly a year of living ten feet away from a thing sending out nightmares? Not even Lory. It has to be me. I’m projecting.
Okay; it’s me.
He lies down again, reminding himself that it’s time he ran another general checkup. He should expand the freeassociation session, too; other people may be getting stress phenomena. Those Tighe-sightings . . . Last time he caught two incipient depressions. And he’ll do all that part himself, people won’t take it from Coby, he thinks, and catches himself in the fatuity. The fact is that people talk a lot more to Coby than they do to him. Maybe I have some of Lory’s holy-holies. He grins, drifting off.
. . . Tighe drifts in through the walls, curled in a fôetal clasp, his genital sac enormous. But it’s a different Tighe. He’s green, for one thing, Aaron sees. And vastly puffy, like a huge cauliflower or a cumulus cloud. Not frightening. Not anything, really; Aaron watches neutrally as cumulus-cloud-green Tighe swells, thins out, floats to ghostly life among the stars. One bulbous baby hand waves slowly, Ta-ta. . . .
With a jolt Aaron discovers it really is morning. He lurches up, feeling vile. When he comes out, Solange is sitting at the desk beyond the vitrex; Aaron feels instantly better.
“Soli! Where the hell were you?”
“There are so many problems, Aaron.” She frowns, a severe flower. “When you come out you will see. I am giving you no more supplies.”
“Maybe I’m not coming out.” Aaron draws his hot cup.
“Oh?” The flower registers disbelief, dismay. “Captain Yellaston said three weeks, the period is over and you are perfectly healthy.”
“I don’t feel so healthy, Soli.”
“Don’t you want to come out, Aaron?” Her dark eyes twinkle, her bosom radiates the shapes of holding and being held, she warms him through the vitrex. Aaron tries to radiate back. They have been lovers for five years now, he loves her very much in his low-sex-drive way.
“You know I do, Soli.” He watches Coby come in with Aaron’s printouts. “How’m I doing, Bill? Any sign of alien plague?”
Solange’s face empathizes again: tender alarm. She’s like a play Aaron thinks. If a brontosaurus stubbed its toe, Soli would go Oooh in sympathy. Probably do the same at the Crucifixion, but he doesn’t hold that against her. Only so much bandwidth for anybody; Soli is set low.
“Don’t pick up a thing on visual, boss, except you’re not sleeping too good.”
“I know. Bad dreams. Too much excitement, buried bogies stirring up. When I get out, we’re going to run another general checkup.”
“When the doc gets symptoms he checks everybody else,” Coby says cheerfully, the leer almost unnoticeable. He’s happy, all right. “By the way, Tiger’s awake. He just took a pee.”
“Good. I’ll see if I can bring him out to eat.”
When Aaron goes in, he finds Tighe trying to sit up.
“Want to come out and eat, Tiger?” Aaron releases him from the tubes and electrodes, assists him outside to the dispenser. As Tighe sees Solange, his hand whips up in his old jaunty greeting. Eerie to see the well-practiced movements so swift and deft; for minutes the deficit is hidden. Quite normally he takes the server, begins to eat. But after a few mouthfuls a harsh noise erupts from his throat and the server falls, he stares at it tragically as Aaron retrieves it.
“Let me, Aaron, I have to come in.” Solange is getting into her decontamination suit.
She brings in the new batch of tapes. Aaron goes down the hall to run them. The Interview room is normally their data processing unit. Centaur’s builders really did a job, he muses while the spools spin nominal-nominal, as before. Adequate provision for quarantine, provision for every damn thing. Imagine it, a starship. I sit here in a ship among the stars. Centaur, the second one ever . . . Pioneer was the first, Aaron had been in third grade when Pioneer headed out for Barnard’s star. He was in high school when the signal came back red: Nothing.
What circles Barnard’s star, a rock? A gasball? He will never know, because Pioneer didn’t make it back to structured-signal range. Aaron was an intern when they declared her lost. Her regular identity code had quit, and there was a new faint radio source in her direction. What happened? No telling . . . She was a much smaller, slower ship. Centaur’s builders had redesigned on the basis of the reports from Pioneer while she was still in talking distance.
Aaron pulls his attention back to the tapes, automatically suppressing
the thought of what will happen if Centaur too finds nothing after all. They have all trained themselves not to think about that, about the fact that Earth is in no shape to mount another mission if Centaur fails. Even if they could, where next? Nine light-years to Sirius? Hopeless. The energy and resources to build Centaur almost weren’t there ten years ago. Maybe by now they’ve cannibalized the emigration hulls, Aaron’s submind mutters. Even if we’ve found a planet, maybe it’s too late, maybe nobody is waiting for our signal.
He snaps his subconscious to order, confirms that the tapes show nothing, barring his own nightmare-generated peaks. Lory’s resting rates are a little up too, that’s within bounds. Tighe’s another fraction down since yesterday. Failing; why?
It’s time to pack up. Lory and Solange are waiting to come in and hook up for the final debriefing, as Yellaston courteously calls it. Aaron goes around into the Observation cubicle and prepares to observe.
Frank Foy bustles first onto his screen to run his response-standardizing questions. He’s still at it when Yellaston and the two scout commanders come in. Aaron is hating the scene again; he makes himself admit that Don and Tim are wearing decently neutral expressions. Space training, they must know all about bodily humiliation.
Foy finishes. Captain Yellaston starts the sealed recorder and logs in the event-date.
“Dr. Kaye,” Foy leads off, “referring to your voyage back to this ship. The cargo module in which you transported the alien life-form had a viewing system linked to the command module in which you lived. It was found welded closed. Did you weld it?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Why did you weld it? Please answer concisely.”
“The shutter wasn’t light-tight. It would have allowed my daily light cycle to affect the alien: I thought this might harm it, it seems to be very photosensitive. This is the most important biological specimen we’ve ever had. I had to take every precaution. The module was equipped to give it a twenty-two-hour circadian cycle with rheostatic graded changes, just like the planet—it has beautiful long evenings, you know.”
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