by Allen Steele
Beneath the back of Mark’s neck and head, tiny crystalline formations, vaguely resembling coral yet a ghastly shade of pink, had grown up from the ground, rising from beneath the snow to touch, embrace, and pierce the flesh of the dead man.
Sean pulled the blanket away a little farther. The same formations hadn’t yet grown up around the skinsuit, which indicated to him that they weren’t fond of inorganic matter. But the delicate crystals had crept into the bottom of the helmet ring, and he had no doubt that, were he to unzip Mark’s suit and open it, he’d find the same process taking place across the rest of his body.
“My God,” Kyra said quietly. “He’s dissolving.”
“Heh ef bing tahken ba tanaash-haq.” Accompanied by her silent husband, Lusah Sahsan had walked over to join them. “Dis es da way daded ah claymed hare. Wen der bohdees ah fownd, dey . . .”
“Disintegrate.” Sean swallowed a mouthful of bile, then made himself walk over to Cayce’s body and pull back its blanket as well. The lieutenant hadn’t been dead as long as Mark, so he was still reasonably intact. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the same process had already begun; coral-like formations were touching the back of his head and neck, along with his bare hands, and his skin looked like it had developed a postmortem case of acne.
“Yesh,” the arsashi leader said, and when Sean looked up at her, he saw that her mouth had stretched back in a broad grimace that looked frightening until he realized that it was a smile. “Do noh greev. Et es ah fon def. Dey ah becohmin won widda wold.”
They are becoming one with the world. Again, Sean wondered what Lusah Sahsan meant, until he realized that his own culture had an expression that was a close parallel to what the arsashi had said. Something that he probably would have said over Mark’s grave had he been given a chance to do so.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he whispered.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ANDROMEDA EXAMINED THE APPLE IN HER HAND.
It was small and, while not perfectly round, fit comfortably into her palm. Tinged with autumnal streaks of dark red and pale gold, it resembled an Empire or a Cortland, the kind of apples she’d grown up eating, but in fact was a Midland Tart, a hybrid of a couple of different Earth varieties that had been created by botanists to produce a fruit that could survive Coyote’s cool climate.
She’d pulled the apple from a lower branch of one of the trees she’d found upon stepping off the escalator that had carried her and the others down from the tram station. Of all the things she’d seen since the Montero had docked with Hex, this small and rather mundane item had surprised her the most. Not because of what it was but simply because it was there.
“This is impossible,” she said softly. Then she bit into the apple; for an impossibility, it certainly tasted sweet.
“Yes, it is.” Tom D’Anguilo studied another apple that he’d picked up from the ground beneath the tree. It appeared to have recently fallen; most of the other apples on the ground were in various stages of decomposition. He turned it around in his hand to show her the small wound in its skin. “And I bet, if you cut into this, you’d find a little brown impossible worm deep inside.”
Andromeda grimaced. “Thanks for ruining my appetite,” she muttered, and was about to toss her apple away before reconsidering. After a week of processed ship’s rations, a fresh apple was an unexpected treat. “This shouldn’t be here,” she added. “Same for the worm.”
D’Anguilo dropped his apple on the ground, gazed up at the tree from which it came. It was about twenty-five feet tall, the same height as the others around it. They belonged to a small grove at the base of the biopod’s southern range, with a few younger ones growing from the mountainside’s lower slopes. A nearby creek meandered downhill, quietly gurgling as it passed through the grove and into the broad, grassy plains on the valley floor, eventually flowing into the biopod’s central river. Rolf had already surmised that the creek, along with others like it, captured condensation trickling down the ceiling window and fed it into the river.
“If you think this place was created yesterday . . . yeah, I agree,” he said. “But apple trees take years to grow to maturity, and it looks like this one has been here awhile. So unless danui bioengineering methods are as advanced as their construction techniques . . . not that I’d put it past them . . . someone seeded this place long before they knew we’d arrive.”
Andromeda didn’t reply. Munching on the apple, she sauntered out from beneath the tree to look up at the escalator ramp. A long monorail made of the same stony material as the biopod’s outer walls, the ramp led straight up the mountainside to the tram station. A flatbed lift, open except for a safety rail around its edge, was slowly moving up the escalator; it was large enough to carry twenty or more passengers at a time, or a few people and a lot of cargo. There was a footpath, too, running parallel to the ramp, but it would probably take someone an hour or more to hike all the way to the top; the escalator was an obvious necessity.
The lift was about halfway up the mountainside; she couldn’t see Melpomene or Rolf, who were on their way back to the node. Since the Montero sometimes traveled to worlds whose inhabitants had made little or no provisions for human guests, the ship carried equipment they’d need in order to set up camp on an alien planet: pressurized dome tents, sleeping bags, a portable stove, lamps, collapsible chairs and tables, even a chemical toilet. No sense in remaining on the ship if they didn’t need to; Andromeda asked Melpomene and Rolf to return to the Montero and fetch the supplies. She’d told Jason that he was welcome to join them if he wanted to do so; however, Anne would have to stay behind in order to watch the ship and maintain the communications relay with Sean’s team.
Which left Andromeda alone in the biopod with D’Anguilo, or at least for the time being. Although the astroethnicist was sometimes an annoying presence, Andromeda could put up with him for a while if it meant that she might get some answers to a few puzzling questions. Like why they were finding apple trees in a place where no human had ever gone before.
“So what do you think?” she asked, turning away from the escalator. “The danui knew we were coming, so they created a bipod suitable for us?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” D’Anguilo left the tree to wander over to the creek. Squatting on his heels, he reached down to pull up a handful of the tall grass growing on its banks. “Just as I thought,” he said, a smile upon his face as he examined their roots. “Sourgrass . . . same subspecies as the stuff in Midland’s mountain valleys.” He looked around himself. “If we were to conduct a natural census, my guess is that we’d find that almost every plant and animal here comes from the same part of Coyote . . . because that’s where the original specimens were collected.”
“The danui have never been to Coyote.”
“No, but the hjadd have. Although they’ve usually kept to themselves in their embassy on New Florida, when I was at the university, I read reports that they’d occasionally sent some of their people to places like Midland and Great Dakota.” He shrugged. “So it wouldn’t have been much trouble for them to gather living specimens, then send them to the danui for this very purpose.”
“I hope that didn’t include boids.” The flightless predatory avians that inhabited the lowlands of Coyote equatorial regions had been the nemesis of early settlers; the thought of finding them in Hex made her nervous.
“I hope not either.” D’Anguilo brushed bits of grass from his hands as he stood up. “But if the purpose of all this is to provide us with a safe and comfortable place, it doesn’t make sense to stock it with man-eaters. Especially when we’ve also been deprived of the means to defend ourselves.”
“You think that’s why they built Hex? To give us . . . I don’t know, a home away from home?” Andromeda was skeptical. “Seems like they went to a lot of trouble for something as simple as that.”
D’Anguilo didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he strolled over to the escalator ramp and sat down on the low parapet surrounding it
s base. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “It’s a mystery to me, too . . . why we weren’t told exactly what was here, why no one contacted us until we’d sent out the survey team, why we haven’t heard from the danui themselves. It’s like we’ve been handed pieces of a puzzle, and we’re expected to put them together ourselves.”
“I thought you said you had a theory.”
“I do, but I’d rather see more before I tell you what I think.” He raised a hand before she could object. “Look . . . first and foremost, I’m a scientist. That means it’s my responsibility to make observations and gather evidence before forming a hypothesis, not vice versa. It’s like when I first saw the pictures of this system. I thought it might be possible that there was a Dyson sphere here . . .”
“But you didn’t say so until we actually arrived.”
“Right. When I saw for myself that I’d made the right guess, I said so.” He smiled. “You’re going to have to be patient with me, Captain. Sorry, but that way I don’t have to apologize for making a wrong guess.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Andromeda finished her apple. For lack of anything else to do with the core, she tossed it beneath the tree. “I guess we can only hope that Sean learns more . . . if he gets here safely, that is.”
D’Anguilo slowly nodded. He regarded her with a pensive gaze that she found discomfiting. “You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”
“He’s my son. Shouldn’t I be?”
“Of course. It’s just that”—he hesitated—“if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t know the two of you were even related.” Feeling her face grow warm, Andromeda cast him an angry look. “Sorry,” he quickly added. “I’m not trying to pick a fight here. But it’s pretty obvious that the two of you don’t get along. I mean, you can barely stand to be in the same room . . .”
“Not because I haven’t tried,” she shot back. “If you’re half as observant as you claim to be, you’d notice that Sean’s been the one who’s been hostile.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right, now that you mention it.” He was quiet for a few moments before he spoke again. “So . . . what’s going on between you two? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.”
“I do mind.” Even as she said this, though, Andromeda had a compulsion to answer his question. It had been a long time since she’d talked about Sean with anyone except Jason and Melpomene. One was a former lover, and the other was the closest she had to a best friend, but both were members of her crew and thus couldn’t be expected to be impartial to their captain’s feelings. Although D’Anguilo sometimes irritated her, Andromeda realized that it wasn’t entirely his fault. He meant well; he simply had a tendency to put curiosity before common sense.
She looked up the ramp. The lift had almost reached the top. It would be a while before Melpomene and Rolf returned from the ship; meanwhile, she and D’Anguilo had time to kill. They could either talk about apples and aliens, or . . .
“If I tell you,” she asked, “can you keep your mouth shut? This is personal, and I don’t want this getting back to your company or . . .”
“I promise. It’s just between you and me.”
“All right, then.” Andromeda let out her breath, then walked over to the ramp base and sat down beside him. “It goes back to when I was in the Union Astronautica, and Sean and I were living in New Havana with Dean, his father . . .”
“Your husband?”
“We were married, yes . . . or at least we’d been, once upon a time.” She shrugged. “But it didn’t work out, so a couple of years after we had Sean, he and I decided to call it quits.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. Other than the fact that he helped give me a son, marrying him was the biggest mistake I ever made.” Almost the biggest, she silently added. “Fact of the matter is that I got hitched to him more as a career move than anything else. Dean was the son of a Patriarch, which meant that his old man was in a government position where he could help me get what I wanted . . . namely, my own ship.”
“That’s how you became the Montero’s captain?” D’Anguilo stared at her in disbelief.
“It was called The Patriotism of Fidel Castro back then, and no, it wasn’t entirely a matter of patronage. I’d already earned my commission and was certified for command rank. But there was a long list of other people who also wanted their own ships, so Dean’s father pulled some strings to have me bumped to the front of the line.” A grim smile. “All I had to do was marry his son.”
D’Anguilo had a guarded look in his eyes. “That sounds rather . . . opportunistic.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Andromeda said, a little more hastily than she meant to. “I liked Dean . . . I just didn’t love him. Or at least not enough to want to remain married to him. And I think he felt the same way about me, too, because he didn’t fight the divorce.” She paused. “Only one problem . . . he wanted Sean, and I wasn’t about to give him up.”
“You had custody?”
“I did, but it was only temporary. After the divorce was finalized, I moved to Copernicus Centre on the Moon, and took Sean with me. Dean didn’t like that, so he decided to fight it in court. Since he had his father on his side, I pretty much knew Grandpa would use his clout to make sure that the magistrate would reverse the earlier decision and give Sean to Dean.”
“Uh-huh.” D’Anguilo nodded. “And how did Sean feel about that?”
“He was too young to really understand what was going on, except that Dad was no longer with us and Mom didn’t like to talk about him. But he loved Dean, and Dean loved him, and . . . well, I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t go with his father if given a chance to choose for himself.”
Andromeda slowly let out her breath. “Anyway . . . the lawyers were still duking it out when the WHU collapsed. When the government fell, it took both the Union Astronautica and the legal system with it.” She looked at him askance. “I’m sure you remember what that was like.”
“Not really . . . or at least not the way you do. I’m a secondgeneration colonist . . . My folks came to Coyote aboard the New Horizons, the second Union ship to reach 47 Uma.” A shrug and a smile. “I knew what was going on, of course, but I’ve never been to Earth.”
“Yes, well . . . believe me, you haven’t missed anything. The global environment had gone to hell by then, and all the old governments and coalitions were breaking down. Anyone with any sense was getting out of there if they could. And I had a ship . . .”
“So you escaped.”
“Uh-huh. I took the matter to my crew, and after they voted unanimously to defect to Coyote, I approached the Federation consulate on Highgate about having a hyperspace key installed in the nav system. They were only too happy to oblige—they were eager to acquire ships since Coyote wasn’t able to build any of their own—and so we took the Castro before the Union Astronautica knew what was going on.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t hard, really. By then, a revolution had broken out in New Havana, and the social-collectivists were being overthrown. So the government had a lot worse things to worry about than someone’s hijacking a ship.”
“And, of course, you took Sean with you.”
“Damn right I did.” She looked him square in the eye. “When the Castro was ready to leave, I went back to our apartment on the Moon, grabbed him and a few belongings, and caught the next shuttle to Highgate. Sean didn’t know what was going on until we were actually aboard ship and about to launch.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That we were going far, far away, but it was going to be to a happy place, where he could run and play and . . .” Andromeda sighed. “Well, you can probably imagine the rest. The sort of thing you’d tell a little boy when you’re yanking him away from everything he’s known and taking him to another world.”
“And what about his father?”
Andromeda hesitated. This was the part of the story she didn’t like to talk about, and she found herself wondering why she was telling it t
o a relative stranger. But it was too late to stop, so she went on.
“I told Sean that his father would be joining us later. That he had a few things he still had to do on Earth, but once he settled his business, he’d be taking another ship to Coyote.” She shrugged. “And, of course, Sean believed me. Why shouldn’t he? I was his mother, and I’d never lied to him before.”
She shook her head. “Funny thing is, I kinda believed it myself. I figured that Dean would eventually find out where we’d gone and that he’d pull strings to get aboard the next Union Astronautica ship to Coyote. But since I’d already requested political amnesty from the Federation, and the Union didn’t have any extradition treaties with them, he’d have a tough time taking Sean away from me. Unless he wanted to defect to Coyote himself, of course.”
“And did he?”
“No.” Andromeda let out her breath. “When New Havana went up in flames, I lost contact with him. The Castro . . . the Montero, I mean . . . was one of the last ships to leave Earth before Starbridge Coyote was destroyed. So I never heard from Dean again.” A wry smile. “Weird thing is . . . once he was gone, I realized that I missed him. If he hadn’t tried to take Sean away from me, we might have even gotten back together again. But . . .”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“No.” Her smile faded. “Anyway, I thought my problems were over. And they were . . . but only for a while.”
D’Anguilo said nothing, but only waited for her to go on. Feeling restless, Andromeda stood up. “I bought a place in New Brighton, and Sean and I settled in, and I got to watch him grow up while I waited for the starbridge to be rebuilt. He had only one parent, but he didn’t seem to mind so long as he was able to continue believing what I’d told him . . . that his father was supposed to be joining us but had been left behind when the starbridge was destroyed. He never knew that Dean and I had broken up or that I’d abducted him, and I didn’t intend to tell him. And he might have gone on believing just that if he hadn’t found my old logbook.”