Foy coughs reprovingly.
“You went to the length of welding it shut. Were you afraid of the alien?”
“No!”
“I repeat, were you afraid of the alien?”
“No. I was not—well, yes, I guess I was, a little, in a sense. You see I was going to be alone all that time. I was sure the life-form is harmless, but I thought it might, oh, grow toward the light, or even become motile. There’s a common myxomycetes—a fungus that has a motile phase, Lycogala epidendron, called Coral Beads. I just didn’t know. And I was afraid its luminescent activity might keep me awake. I have a little difficulty sleeping.”
“Then you do believe the alien may be dangerous?”
“No! I know now it didn’t do a thing, you can check the records.”
“May I remind you to control your verbalization, Dr. Kaye. Referring again to the fact that the cover was welded; were you afraid to look at the alien?”
“Of course not. No.”
Young Frank really is an oddy, Aaron thinks; more imagination than I figured.
“Dr. Kaye, you state that the welding instrument was left on the planet. Why?”
“Commander Kuh needed it.”
“And the scout ship’s normal tool complement is also missing. Why?”
“They needed everything. If something went wrong I couldn’t make repairs; it was no use to me.”
“Please, Dr. Kaye.”
“Sorry.”
“Were you afraid to have a means of unsealing the alien on board?”
“No!”
“I repeat. Dr. Kaye, were you afraid to keep with you a tool by which you could unseal the port to the alien?”
“No.”
“I repeat. Were you afraid to have a means of unsealing the alien?”
“No. That’s silly.”
Foy makes checks on his tapes; Aaron’s liver doesn’t need tapes, it has already registered that hyped-up candor. Oh, god—what is she lying about?
“Dr. Kaye, I repeat—” Foy starts doggedly, but Yellaston has lifted one hand. Foy puffs out his cheeks, switches tack.
“Dr. Kaye, will you explain again why you collected no computerized data after the first day of your stay on the planet?”
“We did collect data. A great deal of data. It went to the computer, but it didn’t get stored because the dump cycle had cut in. Nobody thought of checking it, I mean that’s not a normal malfunction. The material we lost, it’s sickening. Mei-Lin and Liu did a whole ecogeologic streambed profile, all the biota, everything—”
She bites her lips like a kid, a flush rising around her freckles. After ten years in outer space Lory still has freckles. “Did you dump that data, Dr. Kaye?”
“No!”
“Please, Dr. Kaye. Now, I want to refresh your memory of the voice recording allegedly made by Commander Kuh.” He flips switches; a voice says thinly: “Very . . . well, Dr. Ka-yee. You . . . will go.”
It’s Kuh’s voice, all right; Aaron knows the audiograms match. But the human ear doesn’t like it.
“Do you claim that Commander Kuh was in good health when he spoke those words?”
“Yes. He was tired, of course. We all were.”
“Please restrict your answers, Dr. Kaye. I repeat. Was Commander Kuh in normal physical health other than fatigue when he made that recording?”
“Yes.”
Aaron closes his eyes. Lory, what have you done?
“I repeat. Was Commander Kuh in normal physical and mental—”
“Oh, all right!” Lory is shaking her head desperately. “Stop it! Please, I didn’t want to say this, sir.” She gazes blindly at the screen behind which Yellaston must be, takes a breath. “It’s really very minor. There was—there was a difference of opinion. On the second day.”
Yellaston lifts a warning finger at Foy. The two scout commanders are statues.
“Two members of the crew felt it was safe to remove their space suits,” Lory swallows. “Commander Kuh—did not agree. But they did so anyway. And they didn’t—they were reluctant to return to the scouter. They wanted to camp outside.” She stares up in appeal. “You see, the planet is so pleasant and we’d been living in that ship so long.”
Foy scents a rat, pounces.
“You mean that Commander Kuh removed his suit and became ill?”
“Oh, no! There was a—an argument,” Lory says painfully. “He was, he sustained a bruise in the laryngeal area. That’s why—” She slumps down in the chair, almost crying.
Yellaston is up, brushing Foy away from the speaker.
“Very understandable, Doctor,” he says calmly. “I realize what a strain this report has been for you after your heroic effort in returning to base alone. Now we have, I think, a very full account—”
Foy is staring bewilderedly. He has started a rat all right, but it is the wrong, wrong rat. Aaron understands now. The supersensitive Chinese, the undesirability of internal dissension on the official log. Implications, implications. There was a fracas among Kuh’s crew, and somebody wiped China Flower’s memory.
So that is Lory’s secret. Aaron breathes out hard, euphoric with relief. So that’s all it was!
Captain Yellaston, an old hand at implications, is going on smoothly. “I take it, Doctor, that the situation was quickly resolved by Commander Kuh’s decision to commence colonization, and his confidence that you would convey his report to us for transmission to Earth, as in fact you have done?”
“Yes, sir,” says Lory gratefully. She is still trembling; everyone knows that violence of any sort upsets Lory. “You see, even if something serious happened to me, the scout ship was on automatic after midpoint. It would have come through. You picked it up.”
She doesn’t mention that she was unconscious from ulcerative hemorrhage when China Flower’s signal came through the electronic hash from Centaurus’s suns; it had taken Don and Tim a day to grapple and bring her in. Aaron looks at her with love. My little sister, the superwoman. Could I have done it? Don’t ask.
He listens happily while Yellaston winds it up with a few harmless questions about the planet’s moons and throws the screen open two-way to record a formal commendation for Lory. Foy is still blinking; the two scout commanders look like tickled tigers. Oh, that planet! They nod benevolently at Lory, glance at Yellaston as if willing him to fire the green signal out of the top of his head.
Yellaston is asking Aaron to confirm the medical clearance. Aaron confirms no discrepancies, and the quarantine is officially terminated. Solange starts unwiring Lory. As the command party goes out, Yellaston’s eye flicks over Aaron with the expressionlessness he recognizes; the old man will expect him in his quarters that evening with the usual.
Aaron draws himself a hot drink, takes it into his cubicle to savor his relief. Lory really did a job there, he thinks. Whatever kind of dustup the Chinese had, it must have shocked her sick. She used to get hives when I played hockey, he remembers. But she’s really grown up, she didn’t spill the bloody details all over the log. Don’t mess up the mission. That idiot Foy . . . You did that nicely, little sister, Aaron tells the image at the back of his mind. You’re not usually so considerate of our imperfect undertakings.
The image remains unmoving, smiling enigmatically. Not usually so considerate of official sensibilities? Aaron frowns.
Correction: Lory has never been considerate of man’s imperfection. Lory has never been diplomatic. If I hadn’t sat on her head, Lory would be in an Adjustment Center with a burn in her cortex instead of on this ship. And she’s been as prickly as a bastard with poor old Jan. Has a year alone in that scouter worked a miracle?
Aaron ponders queasily; he doesn’t believe in miracles. Lory conscientiously lying to preserve the fragile unity of man? He shakes his head. Very unlikely. A point occurs unwelcomely; that story did save something. It saved her own credibility. Say the Chinese wrangle happened. Was Lory using it, letting Foy pry it out of her to account for those blips on the tape? To get her
self—and something—through Francis Xavier Foy’s PKG readouts? She had time to figure it, ample time—
Aaron shudders from neck to bladder and strides out of his cubicle to collide with Lory coming out of hers.
“Hi!” She has a plain little bag in her hand. Aaron realizes the scanners are still on overhead.
“Glad to be getting out?” he asks lamely.
“Oh, I didn’t mind.” She wrinkles her nose. “It was a rational precaution for the ship.”
“You seem to have become more, ah, tolerant.”
“Yes.” She looks at him with what the scanner will show as sisterly humor. “Do you know when Captain Yellaston plans to examine the specimen I brought back?”
“No. Soon, I guess.”
“Good.” The smiley look in her eye infuriates him. “I really brought it back for you, Arn. I wanted us to look at it together. Remember how we used to share our treasures, that summer on the island?”
Aaron mumbles something, walks numbly back to his room. His eyes are squeezed like a man kicked in the guts. Lory, little devil—how could you? Her thirteen-year-old body shimmers in his mind, sends helpless heat into his penile arteries. He is imprinted forever, he fears; the rose-tipped nipples on her child’s chest, the naked mons, the flushed-pearl labia. The incredible sweetness, lost forever. He had been fifteen, he had ended both their virginities on a spruce island in the Fort Ogilvy Officers’ Recreational Reserve the year before their parents died. He groans, wondering if he has lost both their souls, too, though he doesn’t believe in souls. Oh, Lory . . . is it really his own lost youth he aches for?
He groans again, his cortex knowing she is up to some damn thing while his medulla croons that he loves her only and forever, and she him. Damn the selection board who had dismissed such incidents as insignificant, even healthy!
“Coming out, boss?” Coby’s head comes in. “I’m opening up, right? This place needs a shake-out.”
Aaron shakes himself out and goes out to check over Coby’s office log. Lots of catching up to do. Later on when he is more composed he will visit Lory and shake some truth out of her.
He walks through the now-open vitrex, finds freedom invigorating. The office log reveals three more insomnia complaints, that’s four in all. Alice Berryman, the Canadian nutrition chief, is constipated; Jan Ing, his Xenobiology colleague, has the trots. Quartermaster Miriamne Stein had a migraine. Van Wal, the Belgian chemist, has back spasm again. The Nigerian photolab chief has sore eyes, his Russian assistant has cracked a toe-bone. And there’s Gomulka’s knuckle. No sign of whomever he hit, unless he broke Pavel’s toe. Unlikely . . . For Centaur, it’s a long list; understandable, with the excitement.
Solange bustles in carrying a mess of Isolation biomonitors. “We have much work to do on these, Aaron. Tighe will stay where he is, no? I have left his pickups on.” She still pronounces it “peekups.”
Warmed, Aaron watches her coiling input leads. Surprising, the forcefulness some small women show. Such a seductive little person. He knows he shouldn’t find it mysterious and charming that she is so capable with any kind of faulty circuit.
“Tighe’s not doing too well, Soli. Maybe you or Bill can lead him around a bit, stimulate him. But don’t leave him alone at any time. Not even for a minute.”
“I know, Aaron.” Her face has been flashing through her tender repertory while her hands wham the sensor boxes around. “I know. People are saying he is out.”
“Yeah . . . You aren’t getting any, oh, anxiety symptoms yourself, are you? Bad dreams, maybe?”
“Only of you.” She twinkles, closing a cabinet emphatically, and comes over to lay her hand on the faulty circuits in Aaron’s head. His arms go gratefully around her hips.
“Oh, Soli, I missed you.”
“Ah, poor Aaron. But now we have the big meeting downstairs. Fifteen hundred, that is twenty minutes. And you must help me with Tighe.”
“Right.” Reluctantly he lets sweet comfort go.
By fifteen hundred he is in a state of tentative stability, going down-ramp to the main Commons Ring where gravity is Earth-normal. Commons is Centaur’s chief amenity, as her designers put it. It really is an amenity, too, Aaron thinks as he comes around a tubbed sweet-olive tree and looks out into the huge toroid space stretching all the way round the hull, fragrant with greenery from the Farm. Kawabata’s people must have moved in a fresh lot.
The unaccustomed sounds of voices and music intimidate him slightly; he peers into the varied lights and shadows, finding people everywhere. He can see only a chord of the great ring, with its rising perspective at each end showing only leaning legs and feet beyond the farthest banks of plants. He hasn’t seen so many people all here at once since Freefall Day, their annual holiday when Centaur’s roll is stopped and the floor viewports opened. And even the last few viewing days people tended to slip in and look alone.
Now they are all here together, talking animatedly. Moving around some sort of display. Aaron follows Miriamne Stein and finds himself looking at a bank of magnificent backlighted photos.
Lory’s planet.
He has been shown a few small frames from China Flower’s cameras, but these blowups are overpowering. The planet seen from orbit—it looks like a flower-painted textile. Its terrain seems old, eroded to gentleness. The mountains or hills are capped with enormous gaudy rosettes, multiringed labyrinths ruffled in lemon-yellow, coral, emerald, gold, turquoise, bile-green, orange, lavender, scarlet—more colors than he can name. The alien vegetables or whatever. Beautiful! Aaron gapes, oblivious of shoulders touching him. Those “plants” must cover miles!
The next shots are from atmosphere, they show horizon and sky. The sky of Lory’s planet is violet-blue, spangled with pearl-edged cirrus wisps. Another view shows altostratus over a clear silver-green expanse of sea or lake, reflecting cobalt veins—an enchanting effect. Everything exhales mildness; there is a view of an immense smooth white beach lapped by quiet water. Farther on, a misty mountain of flowers.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Alice Berryman murmurs in his general direction. She’s flushed, breathing strongly; the medical fraction of Aaron’s mind surmises that her constipation problem has passed.
They move on together, following the display which goes on and on across the Commons’s normal hobby bays and alcoves. Aaron cannot get his fill of looking at the great vegetable forms, their fantastic color and variety. It is hard to grasp their size; here and there Photolab has drawn in scales and arrows pointing out what appear to be fruits or huge seed-clusters. No wonder Akin’s crew has sore eyes and stubbed toes, Aaron thinks; a tremendous job. He goes around an aviary cage and finds a spectacular array of night-shots showing the “plants’” bioluminescence. Weird auroral colors, apparently flickering or changing continuously. What the nights must be like! Aaron peers at the dark sky, identifies the two small moons of Lory’s planet. He really must stop calling it Lory’s planet, he tells himself. It’s Kuh’s now if it’s anybody’s. Doubtless it will be given some dismal official name.
The mynah bird squawks, drawing his attention to another panel in the chess alcove: close-ups of the detached fruit-clusters or whatever they are, with infrared and high-frequency collations. It was one of these detached clusters that Lory brought back, along with samples of soil and water and so on. Aaron studies the display; the “fruits” are slightly warm and a trifle above background radiation level. They luminesce, too. Not dormant. A logical choice, Aaron decides, momentarily aware that the thing is out there on a line with his shoulder. Is it menacing? Are you giving me bad dreams, vegetable? He stares probingly at the pictures. They don’t look menacing.
Beyond the aquariums he comes upon the ground pictures taken before the computer was dumped. The official firstlanding photo, almost life-size, showing everybody in suits and helmets beside China Flower’s port. Behind them is that enormous flat beach and a far-off sea. Faces are almost invisible; Aaron makes out Lory in her blue suit. Beside her is the Au
stralian girl, her gloved hand very close to that of Kuh’s navigator, whose name is also Kuh; “little” Kuh is identifiable by his two-meter height. In front of the group is a flagstaff flying the United Nations flag. Ridiculous. Aaron feels his throat tighten. Ludicrous, wondrous. And the flag, he sees, is blowing. The planet has winds. Moving air, imagine!
He has been too fascinated to read the texts by each display, but now the word “wind” catches his attention. “Ten to forty knots,” he reads. “Continuous during the period. We speculate that the dominant life-forms, being sessile, obtain at least some nourishment from the air constantly moving through their fringed ‘foliage.’ (See atmospheric analyses.) A number of types of airborne cells resembling gametes or pollen have been examined. Although the dominant plantlike forms apparently reproduce by broadcast methods, they may represent the culmination of a long evolutionary history. Over two hundred less-differentiated forms ranging in size from meters to a single cell have been tentatively identified. No self-motile life of any kind has been found.”
Looking more closely at the picture, Aaron sees that the foreground is covered with a tapestry of lichenlike small growths and soft-looking tufts. The smaller forms. He moves on through to a series of photos showing the crew deploying vehicles out of China Flower’s cargo port, and bumps into a ring of people around the end of the display.
“Look at that,” somebody sighs. “Would you look at that.” The group makes way, and Aaron sees what it is. The last photo, showing three suited figures—with their helmets off.
Aaron’s eyes open wide, he feels his guts stir. There is Mei-Lin, her short hair blowing in the wind. Liu En-Do, his bare head turned away to look at a range of hills encrusted with the great flower-castles. And “little” Kuh, smiling broadly at the camera. Immediately behind them is a ridge which seems to be covered with vermilion lace-fronds bending to the breeze.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 37