by Joe Pace
Then they were falling.
Hall had leaned back, taking her with him in their embrace, against a nearby privet wall, and it gave way with minimal resistance. The both of them crashed through leaves and branches, coming to rest in the grass beneath the broken hedge.
“Someone’s going to be upset that we ruined their drysfa,” Worth said, lying on top of Hall, his arms still holding her.
“I have to admit that I don’t care,” he replied, and he pulled her back down to him with both hands.
****
Green watched Dr. Reyes as she reviewed the final numbers of their latest analysis. She was sitting, impossibly erect, at one of the portable workstations they’d cobbled together in a vacant barn. The look on her face suggested a foul odor under her nose.
Probably true, thought Sir Eustace Green. After all, this structure had housed herd animals until fairly recently, and evidence of their prior residency could be readily seen – and smelled – in heaps of aging dung piled near the walls. There were other scents, too, less unpleasant, of leather and dry grasses and other things that Green could only guess at. Even the dung-smell itself was mild, mellowing as time passed without fresh deposits, a source more of amusement and intrigue than disgust. Green was fascinated; here was a window into the past of his own species – a people who still engaged in animal husbandry, maintaining flocks and herds of creatures that would be milked, slaughtered, eaten. How scandalously, wonderfully inefficient, he thought. Green was wealthy and noble enough, of course, to have eaten actual flesh-meat before, though the event was scarcely commonplace. Here, these people ate meat almost every day.
What a planet, he thought.
Green was in heaven, or close enough. This was a world alive, in its youth, not seized by a rotting dotage and choked by an overpopulated humanity. Leaves and flowers encroached on pathways, and green things burst from every surface: dirt and wood and even stone; life defiant, life perpetual. There were a thousand specimens he could harvest and return to Kew, a million, a billion. But time pressed. They had already been on-planet for two weeks, and in that time had conducted innumerable tests on the specimens collected with the help of that excellent and adventurous local lad, Jairo. Their suspicions had been borne out, suspicions rooted in Tyson’s rudimentary work from a decade before. This was no simple dash-and-grab job. Cygnus had grains compatible at the genetic level to those back on Earth, compatibility that would allow for replenishment of the stocks the Kingdom relied upon to feed its teeming mouths. But there were differences in cellular replication and germination cycles, differences that required precise chromosomal combinations during hybridization. They had yet to hit on the proper sequencing, though they drew closer with each subsequent experiment.
“Still 15% dark with the nanopore sequencer,” Reyes said, her voice as flat and toneless as ever.
“More molecular adaptors?” asked Green, unsurprised, and she nodded grimly. The Cygni grains were proving stubborn in yielding up the details of their genetic code to the spectral analyses designed for terrestrial flora. It was puzzling, since the basic chemistry of Cygnus so closely mirrored Earth’s that genetic analysis should have been much simpler. Green had already had to recalibrate one of the three mobile spectrometers with a nanopore mixture even richer in proteins, in order to slow the DNA strands during reading. Nature, as ever, so loathe to give up her secrets even to the most persistent prying, thought Green with gleeful frustration.
As Reyes assisted him to load and program the cumbersome machine with fresh samples of Cygni wheat cells, the elderly gardener marveled at her ability to labor in such close proximity, day after day, and yet develop no discernable camaraderie. Green had worked for more than half a century in botany, that most sociable of natural sciences, and had collaborated with dozens of talented men and women from across the Kingdom. Some of them had been distant and difficult, of course, but none ever so aloof as Dr. Adina Reyes. Since before their departure from Spithead, Green had done his best to apply his personal charm and his professional enthusiasm, but had failed to ignite even the slightest warmth. It made the long hours and isolated location a challenge to bear. He had hoped for one last great collaboration, a partnership that would change his field of botany and her sub-field of xenobotany forever. He had dreamed of it. Linneaus, Fuchs, Mendel, Esau…Green.
The old knight sighed and sagged back into a canvas chair as the spectrometer quietly whirred to life, probing deeper into the obstinate gene sequences within. Reyes sat, too, in another chair across the broad wooden floor. Fatigue! Green thought idly. She’s human! A cloud of insects drifted close to his head, high-pitched, irritating. He brushed them aside with a splutter, and a corner of Reyes’ mouth twitched ever so slightly in amusement.
“Still enamored of this primitive world?” she asked.
“At this moment?” Green took out a pocket handkerchief and wiped his face and neck. The midmorning was warm, and the interior of the ancient barn was stuffy, humid and plagued by too many of these tiny flying bugs. Even so, he had rarely been happier, and he said so.
“You’re a pathetic old romantic,” said Reyes.
“Indeed I am,” he replied, “and proud of it.” He rose, went to the cool-storage unit they’d installed on their first day, and procured two plastic canteens of water, offering one to Reyes. She took it, and Green returned to his seat. They both drank in silence for a moment, watching as the spectrometer did its work.
“No romance for you, then, Reyes?”
His question was greeted stonily at first, and frankly Green had expected no better. But he found he was tired of her implacable, icy façade, tired of working so closely in this magical verdant wonderland and yet not being able to talk about its enchantments with the one person who ought to appreciate them better than anyone. After a moment, to his immense surprise, she replied.
“I don’t believe in romance.”
“Don’t believe in it?” Green grinned. “Residue of a broken heart, my dear?” This earned a snort of derision and a scowl.
“You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that all this soft romanticism in the face of so-called natural beauty is a distraction or a nuisance. When I say I don’t believe in it, I mean I am skeptical it exists.”
“But of course it exists!” protested Green, leaning forward animatedly. “You can’t tell me there isn’t beauty in the infinite diversity of life in the universe. The Fisher-Dunn Theorem...”
“Solipsistic nonsense.” Reyes took a small sip from her canteen that would have been dainty had she been even slightly feminine.
“Dunn and Fisher mathematically proved that beauty and love exist,” persevered Green doggedly. “The universe is infinite, and therefore home to infinite forms. If any and all forms exist, then perfect beauty exists, even allowing for observer bias.”
“Self-serving naïveté,” Reyes replied evenly. “Delusional idealism.”
“You’ll excuse me for asking, then,” said Green, “but if those who love the universe so much engender such hostility in you, if the very universe itself offends you, what the devil are you doing out here on this mission? Why save humanity if you don’t believe in what makes us human?”
“We disagree on what makes us human, Eustace. You say beauty and romance, I say intellect and reason.”
“The two need not be mutually exclusive,” he protested.
“We disagree again. But it makes no matter. You are welcome to your philosophy, as childish and outdated as it may be. I don’t believe in romanticism, but what I truly loathe is chaos.”
“You’re one of those order fetishists, then,” Green said. “An artificialist.” She nodded slightly in acknowledgment.
“Humanity has struggled, from our earliest moments, to control our environment, not to coddle and sentimentalize it. Nature, uncontrolled, is chaos. A threat, not an idol.”
“Foolish girl.” Green was more sad than angry. “It’s those like you, worshipers of progress at any cost, who have gott
en us into this mess to begin with.”
“Please. You blame man’s ingenuity, but I would blame his lack of control. No breeding policies, no controls on population, have given us more mouths than we can feed. You worship life and its abundance, and yet it is that overabundance that threatens all of us. You asked me why I came out here, why I agreed to help you and Lord Banks. The answer is that I seek to restore equilibrium, to restore order. Chaos breeds chaos. Only from order can we rationally seek to extend our control over the universe we inhabit. Control and order are the keys to human destiny.”
Green was speechless. Reyes was still looking at him, seeming to wait for some response she could eviscerate, but he wasn’t interested in debating her any longer. She was a zealot, an ideologue, and he might as well argue with his shoe.
Into the uncomfortable silence came the chime of the spectrometer, announcing the completion of the analysis. Green lurched from his chair and accessed the initial results at the workstation. His eyes scanned the first screen, then the second, seeking out the familiar red numbers, but the display was an ocean of green. He turned to face Reyes.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
****
Pearce disembarked from the cutter alongside a handful of other personnel coming back to the Harvest for duty shifts. It had been a quiet ride, each star-mariner lost in his own contemplations. He was thankful for Pott, his thoroughly competent, seemingly indefatigable Australian Lieutenant, but the man deserved some shore leave, too, and with Fletcher consumed by her work on the surface, they were the only two remaining senior officers to share shipboard duty, so they rotated every couple of days. To be honest, the captain didn’t mind. I might be the only one happy to be coming aboard, he thought. He liked being on his ship. It had an orderly familiarity that gave him a sense of control, of order. It wasn’t that matters ashore were problematic; to the contrary, since their arrival everything had fallen into quiet routine rather swiftly. Regular reports from Sir Green were optimistic about the progress of their gathering and testing of the needed flora, aided so cooperatively by Arkadas’ young deputy, Jairo. The captain was forced to admit to himself that, despite his own initial misgivings about him, particularly his sudden chemistry with Fletcher, the man had been a godsend. His scientific expertise and field knowledge were precisely what Green and Reyes needed to conduct their work swiftly and efficiently. Just that morning, Green had given him some sample seeds as proof of their progress. With any luck, we’ll be gone before the month is out, he thought.
Luck. He didn’t trust it. It had betrayed them on the voyage here. And yet none of his fears about the return to Cygnus had yet materialized. Sure, the military seemed more formal, more vaguely menacing than he remembered from his first visit, but that might be no more than his own imagination. The intellectuals had been welcoming, and the crew were taking their scheduled turns on the surface, engaging in the usual pastimes of sailors in a foreign port – seeing the countryside, eating exotic food, relaxing, and socializing with the local women and men who always seemed to make themselves available.
“Captain.”
Zoltan Szakonyi, the ship’s surgeon, cadaverous and humorless as ever, was waiting in the shuttle bay, apparently for him.
“Doctor,” Pearce answered. “What can I do for you?”
“Come with me to Surgery,” Szakonyi said. “There’s something you need to see.” The captain frowned. The ship’s surgeon was a spare, gray man, too old at a glance, yet he never showed fatigue or complaint. Pearce realized that despite their months together on the trip from Earth, he knew precious little about him. He occasionally included messages in the Harvest’s interstellar communications packages, directed at a grandchild, uninteresting though vaguely affectionate. Szakonyi messed with the officers, but rarely entered conversation, and always seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. He was not, Pearce certainly knew, a frivolous creature. Whatever it was he wanted, it must be important. The physician made a gesture, and then followed behind Pearce.
Surgery was a tiny, cramped space, with a single DATA (Diagnostic and Treatment Alcove) and workstation. The rest of the cabin was given over to storage of medical equipment, surgical tools, and pharmaceuticals. Naturally, given the appetites of too many able jacks, the place was always locked. Szakonyi shut the door peremptorily, and began to speak without preamble.
“You have no doubt noticed the avidity with which our crew members respond to the Cygni.”
Pearce had to smile. There was an old axiom in the service: “Past Pluto, all men are bachelors”. He had never really subscribed to that personally; he loved Mary, and had seldom been tempted, even in some of the more notoriously licentious locales he had known. That said, he knew life belowdecks well enough that he looked the other way at most of their shore leave behaviors. Most of the crew were unmarried anyway, either too young, or too sullen to attract a spouse, or simply content with their unattached life. There was, even so, truth to the surgeon’s words. Pearce had noticed, even on his first visit ten years before, that the natives here seemed unusually eager to please their guests. And the crew even more eager than usual to take advantage of that offered hospitality. He had ascribed it, with disinterest, to the remarkable handsomeness of the Cygni, and the remote isolation of the system. He shrugged.
“Past Pluto, Doctor.”
“Yes, yes.” The surgeon waved a spidery, dismissive hand. “I’ve been in space since before you were born, sir, and have seen no shortage of shore leaves, many during much longer cruises than this. I’ve treated every venereal discomfort we know of – Apraxian syphilis, star itch, scorpions.” This did concern Pearce.
“Are the jacks complaining of some new ailment?” The last thing he needed was a – literal – rash of sickness among the crew. That would slow down progress. “I seem to recall from a decade ago that the Cygni were clean in that respect.”
“No,” Szakonyi responded. “I bring the matter up only to remind you of my breadth of experience in this arena. The Cygni appear to be relatively disease-free, though whether they remain so after our visit is an open question.”
“What, then?”
“This.” The surgeon powered up the wide vidpanel above his desk, tapped a few times at the keypad, and the monitor became a kinetic display of bizarre shapes, lurid green and pink against a dull gray background, swimming feverishly against one another like a maddened mob.
“Beg your pardon, doctor, but I’m a starman, not a scientist,” Pearce said. “What the hell am I looking at?”
“You are looking, Captain, at a sample, magnified a hundred times, of the exhalation of a typical Cygni. A male, in this case, and young, but representative of the type. Women appear much the same, from our studies. Much of what you see closely resembles our own respiratory wastes – carbon dioxide, et cetera. As has been observed, the Cygni are remarkably similar to us in their physiology.”
“But you’ve found something different.” A chill was creeping up Pearce’s spine, the beginnings of a vague, cold premonition.
“With the help of Dr. Reyes, yes. The little green circles, you see them? Those are, as far as my extensive experience goes, unique. They appear to be, for lack of a better term, pheromones.”
“Phero-what?”
“Pheromones. A chemical agent, secreted and released by the endocrine system of the individual exhaling, mixing with their breath during respiration. These agents, upon entering the body of another individual, produce a curious reaction. I should say, rather, a range of reactions, from a calming of the nervous system, generating a sense of ease, of well-being, to a more visceral, more excited response, verging on sexual pleasure.”
“Come, Doctor,” Pearce said. “You want me to believe these people spit love potion?”
“Don’t be absurd.” Szakonyi seemed offended. “First of all, it’s not saliva, it’s gaseous. And it’s nothing so trite as love potion. It’s a complex chemical reaction, which I’m certain depends
on a host of societal and biological factors. You’ve no doubt observed that the Cygni are a widely dispersed, highly tribal civilization. Dr. Reyes suspects, and I concur, that it likely emerged as an evolutionary advantage enhancing the mating prospects of certain Cygni, as well as a facilitation of breeding across tribal groups. There are comparable phenomena, she reports, in certain flora, including the…”
“Dr. Szakonyi,” the captain interrupted, unwilling to endure a secondhand lecture from Dr. Reyes on plant biology, especially given his own ignorance on the subject and how often he’d been required to display that ignorance over the last few weeks. “If I understand you, and it’s entirely possible that I don’t, you’re saying that there’s something in what these Cygni exhale that makes others want to like them?”
“Or even love them,” the surgeon replied, stiffly. “Or, more properly, react to them with sexual favorability. If our physiological systems are sufficiently similar to the Cygni that we can metabolize their food, I have to imagine we would have some susceptibility to this effect as well. Much more controlled study is needed, of course, before we can even begin to understand the chemistry involved. But I tell you about this so you will be aware that our responses to the Cygni – the crew’s, even yours and mine – may be artificially softened by this quirk of biology. And if there are other attractions – friendship, say, or sexual desire – they may be strengthened and intensified by these agents. It could act as an intoxicant, compromise decision making, even blunt other loyalties and priorities.” He raised both sparse white eyebrows in emphasis. The doctor was not a stupid man, and he was making a point. “Perhaps substantially.”
Damn, thought Pearce. Fletcher.
Eleven
Grounded