by Robert Onopa
He was startled by the sound of his own name over the intercom. Everyone in the lounge was looking at him, even Miika, whose eyes had gone wide. The Captain had signed off and now Miika was coming over. Jackson was left with the incomprehensible reverberation of his own name in his head.
“. . . of all people,” Miika said, smiling warmly, putting her hand on his.
“I didn’t hear what Captain Blake was, uh, talking about,” he said shamefacedly. “I don’t, uh . . .”
“They’re sending a team down on a shuttle to that planet they’re getting signals from. You’re fourth man on the landing party. Nobody’s ever been on that planet before. How utterly . . .”
“Me?”
“You’re research-certified,” she said. “You’re about the only one.”
His heart sank. Now here was something else for him to screw up on the voyage. He was a specialist only in plant diseases. He’d never even been in a download suit before. The music was starting up again and the strobe started to flash.
“How supra exciting. Wanna free dance?”
When he stood up Jackson could see the slight slick sheen on her dome, the dizzying invitation in her eyes. She was wearing silver-tinted contacts. He hung his head and rubbed his throbbing temples. “I better go study up on a download suit,” he muttered miserably. “I don’t wanna go down there and die.”
* * *
“Listen,” Captain Blake was saying, scratching the blonde stubble on his chin, “in years of looking, no alien life form bigger or smarter than a dog’s been verified, so let’s not get excited, right? Jackson? I’m talking to you.”
Jackson bounced down in the zero-grav of the shuttle, waving his arms for balance. “Just getting used to the suit, sir. I thought it would be, uh, cumbersome.”
“Well, there’s atmosphere down there, so we’re not using helmets. Just make sure you use the O2 supplements. And leave all but one of those specimen cases behind. We’re not going to stay on the surface a minute longer than the twelve-hour minimum, do you all understand that? I want to get to Ganymede on time and get all those damned farm animals out of my pressurized hold.”
Jackson thought he saw the veterinarian who had been conscripted along with him glower, but the Flight Vane Engineer nodded grimly. Before they cut loose the engineer laid out the data again: the probes had picked up coherent light, patterns which fit the language protocol, multiple moving sources. “So the protocol triggered this looksee,” he said, barely a flicker of interest in his eyes. “You ask me, an’ I told the Captain, we’re gonna find some weather phenom and a bug in the protocol program.”
Just when Jackson thought he had it—his arms one way, his legs another, his trunk in rhythm—if it wasn’t exactly a free dance it might pass for one—Captain Blake slapped the thruster control with the palm of his hand, Jackson’s stomach turned a loop, and he hung on for dear life.
* * *
The plain upon which they had landed was dun-colored, rocky, cut by low arroyos formed by erosion, though it was obvious to Jackson that any water had evaporated off the surface of the planet thousands of years before. The clouds were high, pink, wispy. Jackson sucked on his supplemental oxygen tube contemplatively, gazing at the bleak landscape, the line of red bluffs in the distance, considering how he was going to describe the surface to Miika when he got back.
The Flight Vane Engineer had set up the portable computer on its tripod and was fiddling with the probes distractedly, trying to avoid the wrath of Captain Blake, who paced hands on hips, a dark look on his face. A fat reddish sun hung in the sky.
“I don’t see any coherent light,” Blake muttered. “I told you to put us right in the middle of the set. I don’t see a goddamned thing.”
“That is where I put us,” the Flight Vane Engineer said, looking into the steel cone of one of the probes so intently it seemed as if he wanted to crawl inside and hide.
“Well, find something,” Blake said, waving his arms, glaring at the men.
Jackson hurried back to the specimen rack he’d set next to the shuttle and shoveled tiny piles of dust onto the trays. The automatic analyzer signified that the dust was, in fact, ferrous oxide, basalt particulates, carbon particles, a hint of quartz. In summary, it was dust. The carbon was promising but electron micro showed no spores, bacteria, virus. No life.
“I don’t see any trace of animal life,” the vet told Captain Blake after a short hike around the area. “Except maybe for you, ho ho.” He took a swig from a brown unlabeled bottle and politely burped. “Maybe those lights were electrostatic charges in the atmosphere after all.” He leaned back against the starboard landing pontoon, patting it first to make sure that it had cooled, and raised his bottle to his lips again.
“Electrostatic charges. We come all this way to look at the weather,” Captain Blake grumbled. “What the hell are you drinking?”
The veterinarian took the bottle from his lips, held it away from his body and looked at it with a slightly stunned innocence. “I’m, er, sorry, sir. It’s a little home brew from the farmer’s co-op. It’s beer.”
The Flight Vane Engineer looked up from a tangle of wires beneath his tripod. “I hope you’ve got more.”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
Jackson saw the bright flashes first: beyond the bluffs, resolving into narrow beams. They spit out a sequence, like a code, then repeated. There were a dozen of them. For a brief moment they reminded Jackson of the strobe lights which illuminated Miika’s free dancing, then they were gone.
“Good eyes, Jackson,” the vet said, saluting him with a raised bottle.
“We’d better move up there,” the Flight Vane Engineer told the Captain.
“This time put us on the right spot.”
* * *
They had to go through a whole launch rigmarole to get the shuttle up into the bluffs. Jackson watched from the rear port: although the planet seemed to be basically a desert, the bluffs, the ridge-backed mountains beyond, were really very dramatic. They clunked down on a flat spot right where he’d seen the lights, right near the edge, with a dizzying view of the plain. But no sooner had they landed than they saw the lights again, this time from a high plateau in the direction of sunset. Captain Blake quickly took his own fix on the spot, determined the source to be stationary at least while transmitting, and decided they should move again. At the third site there was enough level ground to keep Jackson’s knees from knocking as he hiked around gathering soil samples for his specimen trays. But there was no other evidence that the precise spot was fundamentally any different from the gritty soil a thousand meters away.
“Though I’m, uh, finding more quartz, sir, and some mica. Maybe those lights emanate from mineral harmonics somehow. Say some grav or mag pattern sets up a current.”
The Flight Vane Engineer, tangled up with his wires under the tripod again, knocked over his beer bottle, already empty. “So where’s the complex pattern come from?”
“Could be produced by the crystal structure,” Jackson suggested. The vet toasted his hypothesis by raising his third bottle of beer, and Jackson took a deep, satisfied breath. Between the slightly reduced gravity of the planet, the crisp atmosphere of the plateau, and the exhilarating landscape, he felt terrific. “Or the process could have produced a form of life—I mean the light itself could have evolved into a form of life, it’s possible, and maybe these different geological features . . .”
“You’ve been sucking too much supplemental oxygen,” Captain Blake said. “Look, you’ve got the end of your tube all chewed up.”
“Sir?”
Blake and the others followed the focus of Jackson’s widening eyes, the specimen shovel pointed back toward the plain.
There they were again, brilliant points of light stretching into intense beams, sputtering out a strobe-like sequence of impressive complexity. The Flight Vane Engineer got a probe turned around, and when the lights shut down he took a long pull on another beer, dribbling a bit down hi
s chin because he was keeping his eyes on his computer’s read-out screen.
“Different signal set entirely, Captain,” he said. “But it fits, I’ll be damned, the same language protocol.”
Blake groaned and banged the ship with his fist. He squinted up at the fat red sun, shimmering and huge now that it was so low in the sky. The landscape was turning deep purple, rare shades of scarlet and ochre, the plain striped with almost theatrical shadows. “All right,” Blake said. “We’re staying here through the planet’s night. Right here. Veterinary officer, break out that second case of beer. There’s some bedding under the aft deck.”
“Sir?”
“What now, Jackson?”
“Do you mind if I sleep outside?” Bright stars were already visible rising on the far horizon, opposite the setting sun. “It would be like, um, camping.”
“I don’t care what you do. But I’m telling you all this: unless we turn up something firm, we’re taking the data we have and hauling out of here at sunrise. Let somebody else figure it out. I want to make my schedule. I will make my schedule for transport. Understand?”
The vet passed Jackson an open bottle of beer—a dark malt, and very strong. The first swig alone seemed to give him a headache. He set the bottle down and went to fish out a bedroll.
* * *
Only when the sun had fully set did he realize just how bright the stars were—but of course, he thought, gazing upward into the neon twinkle: thin atmosphere, thousands of near suns. There had been no emanations since the last sighting from the plain, and the rest of the crew had polished off what turned out to be a total of three cases of strong beer. Now, hours later, they slept snoring in the shuttle cabin, and Jackson lay on his back, still looking up—it seemed impossible to him that there wasn’t intelligent life somewhere—rehearsing some casual way in which he could mention to Miika that he had camped out all alone, braving the unknown.
Again he shut his eyes and tried to sleep. He went over the long day in his crowded mind, could feel the weariness deep in his bones, but before long his legs twitched and his eyes came open again. The sight of the vast dome of the heavens above him, lying as he was among the tiny function lights of the probes the Flight Vane Engineer had set out, made him feel suspended in a sea of illuminated jewels. A constellation of blue-white stars directly overhead seemed curiously like the arrays of lights they had seen. They winked rhythmically and reminded him of the strobe lights in the rec pod—and Miika danced into his mind again, her silver shape frozen in time with the music, her breathtaking womancurves, her silver eyes. Miika: the perfect slick dome of her head, her attractively thick lips disfigured by silver lipstick, the marvelous sight of her hips and thighs as she brought her arms back and across, a free-dancing angel.
When he tried to think about something else he could feel every tiny rock he had failed to clear from beneath his bedding. He sat up and clicked on the emergency light he’d brought along, flashing it momentarily on the shuttle to make certain it was still there.
He decided to slip out of his bedroll and walk around. Once he had stretched and taken a few steps in the brisk atmosphere, his body seemed to tingle and he stopped, setting his arms out wide. In the deep blue void beyond, the air seemed charged somehow, slightly incandescent. Who would see him here? Legs this way, arms that way—yes, that was it, more or less. He rocked his head, his trunk, took the steps again, free dancing, the cone of illumination from his flashlight playing over the mountains in a dizzying rhythm. It wasn’t quite right, his rhythm, but he tried, tried again.
Then it was as if the cosmos had exploded, with him at the center.
Jackson was overcome by a brilliance so great he thought for a moment he had been atomized, but no, he could see his feet, his still dancing feet, colors all around him, through him, in him: yellows and reds and greens and blues of such purity and intensity that he would have fallen to his knees overwhelmed had not a new energy filled him as well, an electricity that seemed to penetrate his spine and discharge in each of his nerve cells. It was wonderful! he was feeling, even as he was thinking all colors are contained in white, and the lights screamed all around him. The rhythm he had been trying to find in his head was in the lights now, it was extraordinary. The light, the rhythm, was in his arms too, his legs, his fingers, his toes—it seemed to penetrate into the very cells of his muscles and nerves, he was the dancer and the dance. It was as if new electric blood surged through his heart, and he danced, danced, danced.
The experience seemed to last for hours. He found himself finally a hundred meters away from his bedroll, standing with the single beam of his emergency light shooting off into the darkness. It still moved, ever so slightly, to the new rhythm in his mind, and he felt utterly grand, a new man, excited and transformed.
He ran back to the ship and banged on the hatch. “Captain Blake! The lights, the lights!”
He had to bang away for a full three minutes. Finally the hatch popped open and the Captain swayed woozily into the hatchway, his flight uniform rumpled, his hair awry, one eye closed. Even from three meters away, Jackson caught the sour odor of his breath. Captain Blake held his head in his hands, groaning.
“Sir, I’ve seen the lights again.”
“Jackson, you scum,” Captain Blake croaked, “if you bother me before daybreak, I’ll . . . I’ll have you executed.”
“But sir . . . the lights, they were right here.”
“Probes,” he heard the Flight Vane Engineer mumble behind the Captain. “. . . ’as why probes. Cannu unnerstan’?”
Jackson squeezed his eyes shut in frustration and found he could still see the lights with crystalline clarity, a miraculous rainbow of pink and lime and orange. He snapped his eyes open. “Sir, you don’t under . . .”
“Executed,” Captain Blake cut him off. “It’s my right.” And then the Captain slammed the hatch shut with a clang.
At first it frightened him that he could call the lights back when he closed his eyes, but it wasn’t hard to get used to the new rhythm in his bones, the new bounce to his step. He considered recording some notes on his specimen analyzer, but he free danced for a while again. He could swear his coordination had improved, that his nervous system was responding to some new intelligence. When he lay back down on his bedroll an hour later, wondering if he was too excited to sleep, another wonderful thing happened: the lights in his mind turned pastel, dimmed as if in consideration, and he fell immediately into a deep, sound slumber, the kind of sleep he hadn’t had since he’d been hiking to collect new plant diseases as a graduate student.
* * *
The crew didn’t emerge from the shuttle until three hours after sunrise, Captain Blake’s face ashen, the Flight Vane Engineer with his T-shirt on backwards, the vet stumbling down the ladder and sprawling cursing in the dust. For a full ten minutes the men communicated in a variety of debauched moans, relieved only when the vet found one last brown bottle and popped it open with a spasm of his wrist.
“A dop, I meana drop, of the fuel that launched ’ya. Thassa only cure,” he said.
“I’m telling you, Captain,” Jackson said, “the lights became a part of me. Not ten meters from my bedroll.”
“Had to be drunker than the rest of us,” Blake growled. “You oughta leave that stuff alone. An’ stop shouting.”
“But sir, if you just check the probes, you’ll see. . . .” He wasn’t shouting and what was strange too was the new confidence he felt. He’d had an inkling of it early that morning when he’d walked to the edge of the cliff and hadn’t been afraid in the slightest.
His explanation was cut short by the Flight Vane Engineer’s rapid cursing: he’d caught one of the probe leads in the shoelace he’d been tying and knocked the computer off its tripod. Jackson felt sorry for the man, then embarrassed for him when it turned out that he had connected two of the probes to the wrong inputs before turning in the night before. “Think ’is Jackson did it,” the Flight Vane Engineer tried to maintain, but
the Captain pointed out that the engineer had drunk half a case himself before he’d set the probes. Then he demanded the partial data.
“Issinany,” the Flight Vane Engineer muttered.
“What?”
“Isn’t any,” the Flight Vane Engineer spit out. “An’ don’t shout, please. Tol’ you two probes wrong. Crashed alla data.”
Captain Blake laughed wildly, hysterically. “No data? No data?” Then he abruptly shook his head, his expression flat, and glared at Jackson. “You were hallucinating. That’s what you saw, hallucinations. You drank too much.”
“No I didn’t and I wasn’t hallucinating. The lights were right here.”
“Garg,” Blake choked. “Whata we gonna . . . What time is it?” He tried to focus on his watch, but he’d strapped it on upside-down, then he looked up at the huge red sun, already thirty degrees high. The shock of the bright light brought his hands up over his eyes. “Jesus, wonner if I can fly.”
“But . . .”
“Gotta. Behind already.” He brought his hands down. His eyes were bleary but the resolution in them was unmistakable. “All of you: forget what’s happened here. Wipe it from your minds. We’re packing it in, unnerstan’ me? We got a schedule to make. I don’ want you sayin’ a word about what happened here or all our asses are cooked.”
“Please don’ shout,” the vet pleaded.
Jackson looked frantically over the plain for a sign of light, but he saw only the dun-colored desert, not a twinkle.