Wandering Star

by Steven Anderson

  “Ted?”

  “Hum?” I answered.

  “Do you think Carotti is pretty? Were you attracted to her? I’ll know if you lie to me.”

  “Yes, she’s very pretty.”

  “If I hadn’t taken you, would you have gone to her? Would you be with her right now?”

  “Are you shrewd and ruthless like your father?”

  She chuckled quietly and didn’t ask me any more questions. So we dozed and watched the sky together until the sun came and washed the stars from the morning sky.

  The white seaplane came back the next afternoon, circling the island in a tight turn before settling on the waters of the cove. I watched it from almost half way up the peak where I was searching for outcrops under the thick vegetation while Marcus chased lizards up and down trails that were invisible to my unpracticed eyes.

  “Have you ever been to the top?” I had asked him when we started out that morning.

  He looked up at it. “You’d have to be crazy to do that.”

  “Yeah. Have you?”

  Marcus laughed, “Just once.”

  By the time we returned to the camp for dinner the seaplane had been joined by two large flying boats that lay anchored near each other farther off shore. The grey paint of one was adorned with the emblems of the Palma Federated States, the other for the Oceanus Protectorate.

  At the chow hall, Alice was eating with Jeffers and Recano and I noted a few other OP uniforms, friends having dinner together one last time. I sat with Marcus.

  “What will happen to all the buildings and equipment?” I asked.

  “Most of it’s probably not worth moving, so it’ll stay here waiting for the political situation to be resolved. If that doesn’t happen, in a few years Dulcinea will have reclaimed it and you won’t be able to tell humans were ever here. I’d like to come back, but I’d be just as happy if it was left the way it is.”

  “What will you do while you’re waiting?”

  “I’ll be back teaching Dulcinean biology next term. I’m still on staff at the university.”

  I nodded, watching Alice approach him from behind.

  “Are you ready to go home?” she asked, placing her hands on his shoulders. Marcus winced.

  “Yes, Alice, I am. I find that I have very little to pack,” he answered.

  Alice swung into a chair opposite me, ignoring Marcus’ sarcasm.

  “While you two were having fun today, I was helping the Lieutenants get everyone else ready. They’ll be flying out tomorrow evening, but the three of us will be going with Howard in the morning. Lieutenant Jeffers was supposed to go with us but he requested to go with the rest of his soldiers and Major Kilpatrick approved it.”

  “And what about the lovely Lieutenant Britt Recano?” Marcus asked.

  Alice sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t found a way to fix that yet. I feel responsible, having brought them together in the first place.”

  We finished dinner and walked through the evening twilight back toward the barracks.

  “I’m going to go sit and look at the cove one last time. Would you like to join me?” Alice asked as we passed the burned out cabins.

  Marcus closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Ted?” she asked. “We can talk about, um, about,” she stammered to a stop looking at her hand as I took it in mine.

  “Alice? I’m going back to the barracks and sleep in a bed tonight. If I walk down to the overlook with you I know that’s where I’ll be come morning.” I let go of her hand.

  “OK,” she answered softly, still looking down.

  Marcus was silent while he and I walked the rest of the way to the barracks. As we climbed the stairs to the porch he turned to me and said, “Mr. RuComm, I think you’re going to have an interesting time on your way to Bodens Gate.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Alice believes that no one is as smart as Alice. Or as right or righteous. She always gets what she wants, whether by her own significant talents or with the help of her father.”

  I looked at him, blinked. “So?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Never mind. Just know that she’ll manipulate you to do what she wants and in the end you’ll think it was your idea all along. I’m sure Jeffers and Recano think their relationship is their own doing.”

  Marcus reached for the door then thought better of it. “Sergeant Villanueva,” he said softly to himself with a smile, then to me, “We’re going over the hill for a beer.”

  So we walked back over to the OP camp, I bought Marcus the beer I owed him, and I did finally get to sleep in a warm bed my last night in the Margo Islands, just not for as long or as restfully as I had planned.

  CHAPTER 6

  HANNAH

  WE LEFT MID-MORNING, THE SMALL aircraft making a short run across the water away from the island and climbing quickly. All of us slept most of the way back to Palma Sola, our pilot included. With the loss of time zones, it was nearly dark when we taxied to the dock and Howard shut down the engines.

  An unmarked grey bus was parked on the dock with a single figure bundled in a long coat standing next to it.

  Marcus turned to me as the aircraft was being tied down, “If General Barrows has come to greet us I’m not sure I can bring myself to shake his hand.”

  “I’ll help you push him into the bay if you like.”

  Alice looked up at us from her display pad. “He’s not here. I don’t imagine he wants to see any of us either, other than for publicity purposes. That’s Major Kilpatrick out there.”

  “I was hoping it was your father bringing me the coat that I left in his office.”

  Alice smiled. “Stop by tomorrow morning around 1000. I know he wants to talk to you.”

  Marcus gave me an ‘I warned you’ look but said nothing.

  A sharp wind was blowing across the bay into the city making the short walk to the bus unpleasant, especially when the Major insisted on shaking each of our hands and welcoming us ‘home’ before we entered.

  Finally seated in the relative warmth of the bus I asked Marcus, “So how are you feeling about our odds of survival now?”

  “Ask me that when I’m back in my own apartment. No, ask me that a year from now.”

  “Always the optimist.”

  The bus dropped me off first. I gathered my gear and Kilpatrick said, “We’ll have a debriefing tomorrow in the hotel conference room at 1500. Please make yourself available.”

  I nodded and looked at Marcus and Alice. “Until tomorrow, then.” I shook Marcus’ hand and Alice got out of the bus with me to better wrap her arms around my shoulders.

  “Tomorrow,” she said in my ear.

  The bus left and I stepped over a pile of slush and entered the lobby. Jake was standing next to the hotel pub watching me with a pint of beer in his hand.

  “I remember a time when we were in eighth grade and you wore shorts to school because it was April and you said April is spring and spring is warm. It snowed that afternoon. I see you have no more sense now than you did then.” He put his arms around me, threatening to spill beer down my back. “Damn, I’m glad to see you back in one piece.”

  When he released me I saw that Angela and several other members of the team were there. We ate dinner and drank and I answered their questions as best I could, making the story seem more confusing and more heroic than it actually was.

  Hannah was not there. “Still at work,” Jake explained. “She’s been in a panic since the schedule was cut short. I haven’t seen much of her all week.”

  After dinner I walked with Angela and Jake back toward our rooms. We dropped Jake at his door and Angela continued walking with me.

  “Theodore?” I looked at her and sighed. She smiled. “Ted. You’ve changed in the past few days. Some of the Academy freshness seems to have been knocked off y
ou. I might be seeing the Reunification Commission scientist you might someday become.”

  We stopped in front of my room. “Um, thank you, Angela. That sounds like a good thing.”

  She patted my arm and walked away from me down the corridor. “If you live long enough,” she said without turning around.

  I stood there for a moment thinking about what she had said, then tried to open my door, the door that was keyed to the watch and display pad that were both now part of a melted mass of composite four thousand kilometers away.

  “Damn.” I turned and walked back to the front desk hoping my Margo Islands ID would be sufficient to convince them to resync the access to my new pad.

  It was, and I was turning to go back to my room when Hannah arrived. She came up to me without speaking and gave me a tight hug, the dusting of snow in her hair cold on my cheek.

  “Welcome back, prodigal.” She stepped back and looked at me with her head tipped. “If I didn’t know the truth of it I’d say you were just back from vacation, what with that sunburn. Come buy me a hot chocolate.”

  We found a table near the fire and ordered. I sat looking at her for a long time, not saying anything.

  “Nothing to say, Ted?” she finally asked.

  I laughed. “One of the guys I met on the Island saw you on my display pad and asked me what made you so special. I told him it was because you were so easy to talk to. Now that I have you in front of me I can’t think of anything to say.”

  She smiled. “So you were talking about me while you were there?” She reached across the table and touched her finger tips to mine. “Tell me what happened to you on that island.”

  I went through it from the beginning and she listened, asking few questions and offering only the look in her eyes for reassurance.

  “Hannah, those people died there,” I said at the end, “and I don’t know what it was for.” I swallowed the last of my drink. “We were all pawns in somebody else’s game. I survived, they didn’t, and there’s no reason for that. It wasn’t superior skill or intelligence. I was supposed to die, and instead I’m here with you.”

  “It’s changed you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. You’re still Ted, but you’ll never look at the world around you in the same way. It’s a good change, it was just a painful way to do it.”

  I sighed. “Tell me something normal.”

  “Well, I’ve been working twelve or more hours every day trying to finish my project, which leaves me no time for anything else. Jake has been pissed at me every day because I have no time for him either. He can be a bit of a pain that way, can’t he? But I’ve learned a lot. Did you know that there’s an entirely new slang subculture developing on the city’s north end? It didn’t exist last year when I surveyed the clubs there. I’m working on a theory with Mr. Mahajan relating factors of political and economic uncertainty to the speed of subculture speciation.”

  I listened to her talk, tried to ask questions in the right places and to follow the nuances of lingual drift and the influences of youth rebellion. Mostly I was listening to the cadence of her voice and watching her face as she spoke, the way her hair was starting to come down across her left eye and how she kept pushing it out of the way.

  The next thing I knew she was asking me, “Ted, are you falling asleep on me?”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be tired. I slept most of the way here.”

  “That’s OK, I should be getting to my room anyway. I have a couple of hours of writing to do before bed.”

  I walked Hannah to her room and she opened her door. We looked at each other, uncertain.

  “I think I should not kiss you goodnight,” I said.

  “Why not? You have before.”

  “I know. That was when it was only a kiss between friends.”

  “And what is it now?” she asked, lowering her voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  She took a step closer to me and kissed me gently on the lips, no other part of us touching.

  She pulled back from me after a moment and licked her lips. “I really do have a couple of hours more work to do.”

  “I know. I’ll be here tomorrow.”

  She smiled. “I’m glad you made it back.”

  “Me too.”

  Her door closed and I went to my room, got ready for bed and didn’t sleep. I watched the clock roll from 2238 to 0000 and then 0100.

  Sometime before dawn I dreamed I was one of Marcus’ blue lizards running for my life down the narrow trails on the Margo Islands. The OP chef was chasing me, knife in hand. The chef looked like Jake. As he was cutting off my legs I heard Marcus saying sadly, ‘I told you he would kill you when he found out’ and Alice reassuring me, ‘It’s OK, I’m a certified medical tech.’

  Still groggy, I rolled out of bed, took a quick shower and got dressed. Everyone had left an hour earlier by the time I got down to the lobby, everyone but Hannah. Her schedule was six hours out of sync with the rest of the team. I looked back toward the corridor that led to her room. No. I might already be standing on the edge of that cliff, but I wasn’t quite ready to jump.

  The walk to the University wasn’t too bad as long as I stayed on the sunny side of the street. I stopped for a cup of coffee at The Christie-Cleek and then spent an hour in the geology department museum. Even on Earth new discoveries are constantly being made as scientists try to understand our natural history, but I was still surprised by how much of Dulcinea remained unknown. I was sitting at one of the hands-on exhibits looking at the fossils of tiny shelled creatures through a 10x loupe when Professor Vandermeer found me.

  “What do you think of those little guys?” he asked.

  “Weird. Same basic morphology as a bivalve, but with three segments of shell.” I put the sample down. “It’s like you’ve only just started reconstructing this planet’s evolutionary history. It’s exciting.”

  “It is at that.”

  We walked back to his office where I gratefully retrieved my coat.

  “Did you walk the whole way here? I’d have frozen to death.”

  “I think I stored up enough heat on the Island to last me for several months.”

  He stood looking out his window at the campus for a few moments. I expected him to apologize for the danger he had put me in but he didn’t.

  “Alice has told me about what happened, of course. She was very impressed with your ability to improvise. I think it’s fair to say that the people behind the incident had not anticipated how effective your intervention would be.”

  “Six people still died. And all of the evidence I collected was destroyed, most of it unexamined.”

  “Yes.” The Professor turned from the window and sat behind his desk, motioning me to sit as well. “But you were only one step behind them the whole way. They knew what the evidence would show and they couldn’t risk that, so the operation had to be called off.”

  “Supposition. I can’t prove anything.”

  “No, and you never will.” He smiled slightly. “It’s funny, if I had thought anyone would have had a chance to disrupt the plan it would have been Marcus Wright, given his background.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was in the Internal Security Group before joining the faculty. I was part of the panel that interviewed him when he joined the University.”

  “He was a spy?”

  “Nothing so glamorous. He specialized in human intelligence, more of an analyst really. His travels led him to become interested in Dulcinea and how little of the original ecology still exists. So he left the ISG and went back to school here to become a biologist. A damn good one too. I was sorry to see him to join the Foundation for Margo Islands Development, but I suppose it was inevitable. He wanted to see the original Dulcinean life there so badly he didn’t really care who was paying for it.”r />
  “He seemed to be happy that development is on hold, probably forever.”

  The Professor nodded. “It’s absolutely the best result I could have hoped for.”

  I felt cold suddenly and shivered.

  He smiled looking at me and I shivered again. “I see you understand. On to happier topics. Alice.”

  “I did everything I could to keep her safe.”

  “No, you didn’t. If that were true she would have been on the plane that left ahead of the storm. You did something better, you and Lieutenant Jeffers. You made her work through her fears and do her duty. My biggest failing as a father has been my desire to keep her safe. She’s leaving with you in two weeks, Mr. Holloman. Is she in good hands?”

  “Yes, sir. I would trust my life to any member of this team.”

  He stood. “I will let you get back to them, then.”

  I put my coat on and the Professor turned back to the window with its view of students hurrying to class.

  As I put my hand on the door he said quietly, “Don’t hurt her.”

  “She’s stronger than you think, Professor.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” He smiled at me as I slipped out into the hallway.

  I sent a message to Jake to see if he was available for an early lunch and he replied back that he and Hannah were planning on meeting at The Christie-Cleek in half an hour. I walked around campus until then not sure how to interpret my conversation with Alice’s father.

  “So,” I asked between bites of sandwich, “how do I know where I am on the spectrum that goes from naïve to healthy skepticism to cynicism to paranoia?”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  “What would you say if I told you that Professor Vandermeer just implied that he was complicit with the attack in the Margo Islands, told me how important his daughter is to him, and then threatened to come after me next if I allowed her to get hurt?”

  “Paranoid.” Jake ruled.

  “Maybe cynicism,” Hannah said thoughtfully. “This planet is all wheels within wheels. After listening to people talking every night, nothing would surprise me.”