Amid the Crowd of Stars

by Stephen Leigh

  Still, Ichiko felt a stab of irritation, knowing that Bishara was undoubtedly judging her. If she is, it’s your own damn fault. You made the choice. You continue to sleep with Luciano, after all. The internal accusation burned in her head, as it often did of late.

  Her AMI stayed silent. That, at least, was a small blessing. She could unfortunately imagine what her mother-analogue might have said.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Ichiko told her; it seemed the safest reply. “Is my transport to Dulcia ready? I’d like to see the town so I can start to familiarize myself with it. Satellite photos and data reproductions . . . well, they’re just not the same.”

  Bishara smiled briefly at that—probably because it meant that Ichiko would be quickly out from underfoot. “Understood. And having been to Dulcia once myself, I’d agree. I think you’re going to be surprised by what you find there.”

  “Pleasantly so?” Ichiko asked, and Bishara laughed.

  “It depends on what you’re expecting and what you’re looking for,” she answered. “But yes, your flitter’s waiting outside, and you can leave as soon as we’ve gone over protocol and you’ve been shown how to use your bio-shield. Your AMI can provide guidance to the town; it’s about twenty minutes away, ship-time; you may have seen it from your shuttle as you came in.”

  An ensign came up to Bishara holding two thick and wide belts studded with circuitry—Bishara must have summoned him through her own AMI. He saluted and handed Bishara the belts, glancing once at Ichiko with strange intensity. Does he know about Luciano, too?

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Bishara told him; he saluted again and left them as Bishara handed the belts to Ichiko. Their weight surprised Ichiko; she nearly dropped them. Bishara raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  “Those are your bio-shields,” Bishara told her. “Each one is good for roughly 48 hours, ship-time, before you need to recharge it; that way you have a cushion if you get stuck out there somewhere since the flitter itself can’t keep out the local environment. The shield will turn on automatically once you fasten it; if you need it, your AMI can interface with the other controls and give you status updates and charge levels. The bio-shield will keep you in a safe, filtered bubble: no local bugs or pathogens can get through—though you also can’t eat or drink the local fare or even actually touch someone—and of course you need to wear the special pants that go with it so you can relieve yourself if you need to.” Bishara grinned at that.

  “I know,” Ichiko said, grimacing. “They made us wear them during training. Didn’t like the experience then, and I’m sure I still won’t.”

  Bishara shrugged. “Make sure your shield is activated before you step outside the base and make sure it stays on until you’re safely back inside. Otherwise . . .”

  Bishara gave a double-shouldered shrug. Ichiko knew what she wasn’t saying: otherwise, you could be stuck here for the rest of your life. The warnings in the sheaf of liability waiver forms Ichiko had needed to sign before she’d been permitted to go downworld had been extremely explicit about that possibility. “Any other questions for me or my AMI?” Bishara asked.

  Ichiko shook her head. “I’m sure my AMI can answer them if any arise.” She wondered what Bishara’s AMI sounded like. Would the lieutenant be someone who just stuck with the generic, standard voices? Would her AMI be male or female or gender-neutral? Would it speak to her in Standard English or in some other language?

  “Fine. When you get back, I can show you the dormitory here. At Commander Mercado’s request, I’ve made arrangements for you to have a private room while you’re on-planet. Just leave your duffel with me unless you have equipment in it you need to take with you to Dulcia; I’ll have someone put it in your room. The room’s small, but . . .”

  “I’m sure it will be fine.” Ichiko put down her duffel and unzipped it, taking out the small armpack with her recording equipment and zipping it again. “I really appreciate your putting up with me here. I know I’m just one more duty you have to deal with.”

  Another shrug accompanied by a tentative smile slightly more genuine than her previous efforts. “I’ll radio Minister Hugh Plunkett and tell him you’ll be on your way,” the lieutenant said. “Minister Plunkett’s in charge of Dulcia, and he’s a decent enough sort for a Canine. I’ll expect to see you back here in six hours or so. That should give you enough time for your first foray onto Canis Lupus. As you undoubtedly experienced on the way down, this world’s not always the kindest host. If you’ll follow me again, I’ll take you down to the flitters.”

  A World Full Of Magic Things

  ICHIKO DECIDED THAT “not always the kindest host” was an understatement.

  A trio of flitters were parked in a bay on the ground level of First Base, set off from First Base by an air lock since once the bay doors opened, the vehicles were bathed in Canis Lupus’ atmosphere. Bishara had left Ichiko at the door to the air lock with another ensign. Glancing through the air lock windows, she could see the flitters snared in blinding spotlights with the bay doors yawning wide to expose the local landscape. Outside, curtains of the wind-driven rain that Ichiko had managed to nearly forget hammered the ground and splashed up to pool on the concrete floor.

  “Put your bio-shield on now,” the ensign instructed her, “and I’ll open the inside air lock door. Once you’re in, the outside door will open as soon as the pressure’s equalized. Your flitter’s the one in the middle; I’ve already made sure that the flitter can see your AMI and pair with it. All you have to do is instruct your AMI to take the flitter to Dulcia.”

  Ichiko nodded that she understood. She put on the belt of the bio-shield; a mild tingling surrounded her momentarily as it activated. The ensign touched the contact on his own hand to communicate with his own AMI; a moment later, the base-side air lock door opened with a hiss. Ichiko stepped inside the air lock chamber, and the door swung shut behind her. She looked back and saw the ensign waving encouragingly. A few breaths later, the outside door to the flitter bay opened and she stepped outside—for the first time surrounded by Canis Lupus’ atmosphere. She felt herself unconsciously holding her breath. It’s okay. You’re safe. She inhaled deliberately; the bio-shield’s air tasted coppery and metallic.

  She wondered how the air of this world actually tasted, what it smelled like, or how the wind or the humidity might actually feel. You’ll never know that. You can’t ever know such things if you want to go home again.

  She stepped into the flitter, the control panel illuminating as soon as she sat down. The bio-shield was like a gelatinous membrane extending a millimeter or two from her skin and clothing, a bulky, invisible suit between her and anything she tried to sit on or touch. Her boot soles didn’t quite contact the floor plates. The belt of the bio-shield felt warm around her waist, and she could swear it made a low hum that lurked irritatingly just below the range of her hearing. She touched thumb to ring finger, pressing a little harder this time. she thought,

  She heard fans engaging as the flitter lifted, settled, then moved forward and away from the base. She looked back to see the bay doors closing.

  The ride down from First Base, set on a high plateau, to Dulcia nestled in its harbor, was nearly as bad as the shuttle descent.

  The rain and wind remained a constant presence, smearing water across the windshield of the vehicle that blurred the violet-tinged landscape outside. The flitter rocked from side to side in the gusts as it hovered over the terrain. At least, she didn’t have to actually drive the damn thing. Her AMI did that for her though there were manual controls that would extend from the dashboard to use if she wished. She didn’t.

  And the light . . . Canis Lupus was tidally locked to its star, Wolf 1061, with one hemisphere always facing Wolf 1061 and the other always facing starward: one side eternally hellish, the other eternally glacial. The planet’s habitable zone was a 1,000-kilometer-wide swath along the term
inator strip between the two sides, where water was liquid and the temperature moderate. That also meant the sun never quite fully rose or fully set. The inhabitants lived in a perpetual, reddish twilight—when they could see the sun at all through the cloud cover. Even though the Odysseus kept shipboard lighting at similar levels and coloration, this world never seemed quite bright enough to Ichiko.

  she asked AMI, double touching her contact this time so that she’d have continual access for the trip.

 

 

 

  The flitter banked left over a ridge of the mountain, and there, suddenly, was Dulcia laid out before her, stretched along the interior edge of a narrow inlet of the aptly named Storm Sea and protected by a headland on the other side of the harbor. Closer to the flitter, there were cleared farm fields planted with rows of purple, pink, and orange-leafed crops that Ichiko didn’t recognize and couldn’t eat even if she did. A few of the fields were occupied by the six-legged, round-bodied, and extraordinarily hairy ruminants that the locals had dubbed “sheepers”—a portmanteau word combining “sheep” and “spider”—raised both for meat and for their pale, woollike hair.

  The flitter passed over the farms cut into the lowering slopes of the mountains before finally descending into the town proper where, through the rain, Ichiko saw a strange amalgam of stone buildings, some with thatched roofs, others with roofs of slatelike stone, but all of them small and none that looked to be more than two stories tall. A quay stretched the length of the town’s center at the water’s edge. Ichiko glimpsed fishing boats moored here and there, rocking gently with the gray-green swells.

  There were people in the streets, staring at the flitter as it passed above them. Ichiko noted what she already knew from the records on Odysseus: the people here were far more homogenous than the crew of their starship, whose crew was deliberately multinational and multiracial. That had not been the case for those who had crewed the original exploratory ships before the Interregnum. The crew for those first starships had been chosen because they all spoke the same language and shared the same general culture: British Isles, North American, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, German, and so on.

  AMI said.

 

  The flitter shivered as if cold. The sound of the wing fans grew louder as the flitter slowly settled to the ground near the gathering, wafting down as gently as an autumn leaf—though there were no deciduous trees on this world where the climate remained largely uniform throughout the year. The hatch opened as Ichiko unbuckled her seat harness and a short set of stairs extruded from the hull. A burly man in a woven flat cap beaded with the rain stepped forward, a fringe of unruly white hair curling out from underneath the cap and several days’ growth of beard on his chin. He walked with a limp as if his hips or knees pained him. His hands were thick and obviously used to manual labor: broken fingernails with dirt caked underneath. He was missing an upper incisor; the gap showed as he smiled. “Dr. Aguilar?” he said, nodding to Ichiko as she stepped from the flitter. He extended his hand toward her, then pulled it back before she could respond as if he understood that she couldn’t actually shake hands. “I’m Minister Plunkett, but please call me Hugh. Welcome to Dulcia.”

  In the case of Canis Lupus, the original crew had been drawn almost entirely from the British Isles—their common language had been British English. From the recordings Ichiko had heard, their accent sounded like an odd blend of Irish and Scottish with a touch of Midlands and Welsh thrown in, and their idioms and even vocabulary sometimes drew on the older languages of the region: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton.

  “Thank you, Min . . .” Ichiko stopped and smiled. “Hugh,” she finished. “And please call me Ichiko.” She looked around the harbor. What looked to be a translucent, huge slug was passing along the street, though she could see the half dozen stubby legs on which the creature moved. On its head was what looked like the folded starnose of a tardigrade, set below two huge eyes that moved independently, one looking at Ichiko and the other trained on the group of humans. The beast—called a capall, Ichiko knew from the database—was hitched to a cart filled with bricks of local peat and driven by a young woman, prodding the creature with a long stick.

  Ichiko could feel the small crowd behind Hugh staring at her. Waiting. They were all heavier and thicker than nearly any of the Odysseus crew: an artifact of the heavier gravity producing increased muscle mass. She made a mental note to look for other bodily changes wrought by the environment. Nagasi Tinubu, the head of Ichiko’s sociological/archeological/biological team on Odysseus and the person to whom Ichiko reported, had blood and skin samples; by now they’d have run DNA tests. She’d have to ask AMI to send her those later.

  “Dulcia is so . . .” Ichiko began, then stopped. she heard AMI suggest. “. . . charming. It reminds me a little of a village I once knew in France, on the Atlantic.” Except that there were horses there, not capall, and the sky was such an incredible blue, and the light from the sun was so strong I had to wear sunglasses against the glare . . .

  “It’s not so much, compared with what you have on Earth, I’m certain.” Hugh shrugged, as if he’d guessed what Ichiko was thinking as he watched the capall and cart lurch past. “But it suits us. We’re comfortable enough here, and better than when all of our ancestors were crowded into your First Base.” Ichiko decided she loved the accent, with the subtle rolling of his “r”s, the sibilance, and the shortening of words ( ’Tis not s’much, compared wit wat yeh have on Eart . . . ), though the speed of his speech required her to listen carefully. She’d also have to look into how much their language and idioms had changed over the centuries of isolation. “What is it yeh be wanting here, Ichiko?”

  “I’m an archeologist, sociologist, and an exobiologist. That should give you an idea of my interests.”

  “That’s a bleedin’ lot of schooling yeh must have, then.” Hugh cocked his head appraisingly. “Yeh don’t look old enough to have studied so many subjects.”

  Ichiko laughed. “I’m older than I look, and there’s only so much room on a starship, even one like Odysseus. Almost everyone has more than one area of expertise. I’m here to try to understand the society you’ve put together—without any judgment or prejudice. Your survival here is . . . well, it’s nothing short of remarkable. We’ve learned that too many of the other bases and settlements left behind on other worlds didn’t survive at all—they died just like your people on the southern continent. But you’ve managed to live and thrive. I want to understand why.”

  “And will the answer to that help those of us who might be thinkin’ of returning to Earth? Meself, I’d love to see County Clare in Ireland one day; that’s where me own ancestors came from.”

 

  Ichiko could only shrug at AMI’s comment. “I’m afraid that decision’s not in my hands,” she told Hugh, “and nothing that I’m doing here is likely to affect it. I’m just a researcher exploring and recording the culture and society you’ve put together here.” The lines of the man’s face tightened, and his cheeks grew more flushed. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted,” Ichiko hurried to say.

  “It’s the one I expected yeh to give me. Can’t have any of those wicked alien bugs in our bodies making it back to Earth. Not until yeh know if yeh can kill ’em. It’s why yer wearing what yer wearing, after all.” Hugh sighed before she could make a rejoinder, moving away from the gathered crowd, which was growing larger and noisier. “Why don’t I give yeh a little tour of Dulcia from yer flitte
r first, and afterward yeh can walk around as yeh wish.”

  * * *

  “I have to say, it was lashing out there while I was waiting for yeh,” Hugh said once he was inside the flitter. “At least it’s dry in here.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “I hope yeh don’t mind my taking yeh off private-like, but some of the others were getting restless,” Hugh said as the flitter lifted from the ground. He pointed to the west, and AMI obediently headed the flitter that way, moving slowly along the quay toward a cluster of buildings at the end of the town. “Truth is, we’re all a little suspicious of yeh Terrans and I didn’t want any of ’em bothering yeh and asking questions yeh couldn’t or can’t answer. Given that Earth abandoned us once, I suppose yeh can understand. I thought it better if we could talk here alone for a bit.”

  “Is this where you warn me to watch what I say or do?” Ichiko asked. “Or are you suggesting I should bring a few marines with me next time?”

  Hugh chuckled. “Nothing’s quite so dire that yeh need armed guards, I’m thinkin’. But aye, yeh should watch what yeh say. Everyone’s going to be trying to decipher the subtext.”

  “And if there’s no subtext at all?”

  “Then it’s even worse since everyone will just make up their own. ’Tis the way it is with people here.”