Wandering Star

by Steven Anderson

  “Not yet. What do you think? Swim first then lunch, or the other way around?”

  “You set up for lunch. I want to go see your lake. Is the water warm?”

  “Go see. It’s just over that rise.” I pointed.

  I got out some of the packaged food and spread a blanket in front of the tent. I watched her climb up the slope and disappear down the other side and felt sudden panic. I ran up the slope after her, skidding to a stop at the top. Alice was kneeling down with her hand in the water checking the temperature. She looked up when she heard me come over the top.

  “It’s warm,” she called back. “Geothermal?” She looked at me standing there. “What’s wrong, Ted?”

  I walked down the slope. “Nothing. Lunch is ready.”

  She looked at me closely, her eyes crinkled. “You were afraid you’d come over the top of that hill and I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Something like that. It crossed my mind.”

  “Food first, then swim.”

  We ate, we swam, we explored the caves and in the evening we sat around the fire and watched the stars.

  “Where do you suppose the Tarakana come from?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. Certainly not from Cleavus. There’s nothing else here other than some moss by the lake and probably microbes in the soil. You have a theory?”

  “Maybe. They hide, not just individually but they hide their entire civilization. They could be on the same planets we are and we’d never know it. If there had been a dozen on board Wandering Star would we have known about it?”

  “Star would have known.”

  “Would she? I’m not so sure. They hid a bridge and a city from her.”

  “Which reminds me. Doesn’t Wandering Star have safeguards that should have prevented the Bovita clan from taking the shuttles and stealing the ship? How was that possible? Could the Tarakana have helped them just to get the clan off of Cleavus?”

  “I don’t know how they did it,” I lied. “I suppose that’s possible.” Alice looked at me. I looked at the fire.

  “They should be almost half way to Bodens Gate now. I pray for them all the time, they’re always in my mind.” She smiled at me. “I don’t imagine Velena is taking to captivity very well.”

  I nodded. “If she gets free you should be praying for the clan.”

  Alice laughed.

  We spent the evening there talking about our friends, those on Earth and Dulcinea and those on the ship. We planned what we needed to do to create a geologic map of the area and we watched the stars. Late in the night we climbed into the tent and I slept holding her hand to make sure she didn’t disappear.

  “No, Ted, no, no. no. That does not make sense. Look at the thickness of this layer compared to what you measured south of town. And it’s at a different elevation. You can’t correlate them that way.” She reached in front of me and moved the formation with her finger, sliding it down the screen. “Now it matches better.”

  “OK, those six layers match now but nothing else does. And you know you can’t trust the elevation data. This thing,” I gestured at the display pad, “is using air pressure. Who knows what truth is?”

  Alice leaned back. “I suppose there could be discontinuities. Or some of the layers might pinch out. We need an intermediate point.”

  “Like the canyon where the bridge used to be.”

  “Yes. We can enter the valley where the trail to your camp cuts across and then follow it back to where it narrows. There’s good exposures there.”

  “OK. It’s been almost a week since we were last at the lake and I’m getting tired of sponge baths. We can leave in the morning, work on the survey and have a late afternoon swim.”

  Alice nodded. “We’ve been working on this map for over a month. I want it to be right.”

  “It will be. We work well together. You piss me off most of the time, but it’s hard to argue with the results we’re getting.”

  She smiled at me. “I want to get up now and your dog is sleeping on my feet again.”

  “Were you thinking about your feet being cold?”

  “Maybe.”

  I looked at him sleeping under the desk. “Mac, I think her feet are warm enough now. Go sleep somewhere else.” Mac shuffled a few feet away, flopped on his side and went back to sleep.

  “He does that really well, considering that everything he knows about being a dog he’s pulling out of your brain.”

  “Maybe that’s why I can’t help but love him.”

  Alice shook her head. “Hopeless.”

  “I’m going to shut all of the lights and heat down and try to print some rope for tomorrow. I’ll be lucky to get two meters an hour out of it, so I’m going to look around town and see if I can find more while it’s running.”

  “OK. I want to stay here and work on these correlations.” She glanced up at me. “Don’t get lost.” She looked back at the screen.

  I set up the printer and then stood in the doorway watching her work. She had her long legs tucked under her and was leaned forward with her nose almost touching the screen.

  “Alice?”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “Never mind. I’ll be back soon.” She turned back to the screen and didn’t notice me watching her for another five minutes before I left.

  The next morning I coiled up twenty-five meters of rope while Alice set up our signs and beacons against the possibility that a ship might come while we were away. We walked out of town, leaving Mac behind to guard the lab.

  “That rope doesn’t look strong enough to climb.”

  “It’s not for climbing. See the marks on it? They’re ten centimeters apart. I’m going to attach this at the top of the cliff and throw it over the edge with a big rock tied to the other end. We can get a couple of images of it from the other side and the application on the pad will tell us how thick each layer is. It won’t give us strike and dip but we may not need them.”

  She smiled at me. “Smart and lazy is a great combination.”

  We set up the rope then climbed down into the valley and back up the scree to the other side. I took Alice’s hand and helped her over the last boulder to the top. She was sweaty and breathing hard.

  “Ted?” She looked up at me from the rock where she was resting, her head leaned against my side.

  “Yes?”

  She stared at me for a moment. “Never mind. Let’s go see how your rope looks from this side.”

  “I’m hoping we have enough sun on it. We might have to move the rope to the north side and do this over again.”

  I took the images and waited while the application tried to interpret the data and compensate for the angle looking into the canyon. Alice leaned over my shoulder and watched the numbers fill in for each layer.

  “Look at that,” Alice said. “Survey all done.” She kissed my cheek.

  “More time for swimming. We can plug the new numbers into the model this evening and see if the correlations work any better.”

  We stopped by the camp long enough to drop off our packs.

  “Give me a ten minute head start to get clean and then you can join me.” Alice took the soap and left me in the camp.

  I waited the allotted time and followed her. I took off my boots and shirt and waded out to where she was floating on her back.

  “My turn for the soap. I’m smelly.” She rolled over and dove gracefully and came back to the surface next to me.

  “I like the way you smell.”

  “Uh huh. Soap please.” She handed me the bottle and I washed what I could with her there.

  We spent the afternoon in the water swimming, playing, laughing and talking until I noticed it was starting to get dark.

  I swam to the edge of the lake and called back to her. “It’s getting cold out here. Come up onto the bea
ch and I’ll bring you a towel.”

  I dried off and came back to the shore. I watched her walk out of the lake in the fading light, water dripping from her hair and shirt.

  “It’s freezing out here.” She took the towel from me and started drying her hair.

  “You start at the top, I’ll start at the bottom and we’ll try to get you dry before it’s too late.”

  She spread her legs apart a little and I knelt and took my towel and dried her. When I finished she was looking down at me with a strange smile on her lips.

  “Ted, I don’t think those shorts are hiding your feelings quite as well as you think they are.”

  I glanced down and then back up at her. “Says the woman wearing the wet t-shirt.” Her lips were parted in a crooked smile and her hand was on my shoulder.

  I stood and she moved close to me. “Alice, I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret later.” She put her arms around my neck and pulled me down to her, her lips touching mine while she talked.

  “Like walking away right now? I know I would regret that later.”

  I held her close to me. “That t-shirt is cold.”

  She stepped back and pulled it up and over her head with one hand, dumping it on the sand. “Problem solved.”

  She took one more step back and held my eyes with hers, glowing pale blue defiance in the twilight. “I need to ask you something before this goes any further.”

  I looked back into her eyes, trying to ignore the beauty of her body as she stood there in her shorts, the surface of the lake shimmering behind her.

  “If you’re just a boy looking for a pleasant interlude between now and when we’re rescued then we should stop now, that’s not what I need. A month ago your heart was not yours to give. Have you reclaimed it? Can you offer it to me now without reservation?”

  I knelt in front of her, my eyes still on hers. “I can.”

  “I am a jealous lover, Ted. Jealous of who receives my love and whose love I take.”

  “Alice, I have spent every minute of my life with you for over six weeks. On most nights we’ve slept in each other’s arms and given comfort to each other against the loneliness and to keep the nightmares at bay. I’ve never known anyone so deeply and so well. We’ve worked together to survive.” I smiled at her. “Not a day has gone by that we didn’t argue, loudly, about something and not an argument has passed that I didn’t love you more at the end.”

  She smiled back at me. “That’s because I won all those arguments.”

  “Really? Is that how you remember it?” I reached up and took her hands and pulled her roughly down on to the sand, both of us kneeling, so close I felt her breath on my face.

  “Alice, there is a part of my heart that I will never reclaim and there is nothing I can do to get it back. Also, you should know that looking at you now,” I finally let my eyes look away from hers and travel down, “I am that boy who wants the pleasure that comes from being with a girl. But I am also a man who loves you and only you and I know what that means.” I looked back into her eyes. “I will work at it hard the rest of my life, trying to be worthy of the woman I love.” I took her hand and pressed it against my chest. “Do you feel it? The heart that you own?”

  She was breathing hard and her eyes glistened bright. She took my hand, kissed the palm and placed it on her chest. “It’s been yours for a long time, you had only to claim it.”

  I kissed her lips, long and gentle.

  “Take me someplace warmer, Ted.”

  We held hands and walked back over the hill to camp.

  She sat on the blanket in front of the tent and leaned back on her elbows while I started one of the self-igniters. I got two more and put one on each side of the blanket and started them too.

  “How many of those do we have left?”

  “There was a box of a hundred in the lab. We won’t run out.”

  “I like the effect. I can feel the warmth on my sides and feet and the cold air coming down on top of me. Hot and cold at the same time.” She smiled at me as I sat down next to her.

  “You’re staring at me, Ted. Do I still look so strange to you? Like I did the night we first met?”

  “No, not strange. Enchanting. Beautiful.” I put my hand on her hip and ran my fingers under the waist of her shorts. I looked into her eyes, feeling rational thought rapidly fading away. I straddled her on all fours and kissed her mouth and then her neck as she leaned back, one arm behind her head, her other hand on my chest caressing its way down.

  I could feel her tongue on my ear as she whispered, “Why don’t you show me what it was that your shorts were failing to hide?”

  We made love under the stars, the flames around us keeping us warm until sometime after midnight when we went into the tent and slept in each other’s arms late into the morning.

  I woke to the sound of Alice unwrapping some of our packaged food. I could see her sitting on the blanket in front of the tent through the open door. She was wearing a warm sweatshirt but nothing else. Mac was lying next to her, his head in her lap and she was absently scratching his ears while she ate.

  “Thanks for waiting for me.” I called out to her.

  “I tried to wake you. You said bad things to me so I left.”

  I climbed out of the tent and stretched. “When did Mac get here? Doesn’t he know that he’s supposed to be on guard duty?”

  “He was here when I got up. I think he decided that you were more in need of protection than the lab. I’ve been telling him that he’s too late.”

  I kissed the top of Alice’s head. “I’ll be right back.” I went to where we had established a latrine then put on a sweatshirt and shorts. I sat down in front of her.

  “Oh,” she sounded disappointed. “You got dressed.”

  “Not planning on getting any work done today?”

  “Not the kind that requires getting dressed.”

  I put my hand on her foot, rubbing her bare toes. “I think we’ve earned a couple of vacation days.”

  I reached over to scratch Mac’s other ear. It was normally easy to forget that he was a Tarakana and not a dog, the mental and emotional connections were so muted. Normally, but not this time.

  I heard Alice gasp and then I was looking at her, bright and glowing in my mind. I felt a momentary resistance as she hesitated, tried to hide and then whispered yes, this too. I don’t know how long it lasted, having her in my mind and me in hers but my hand was still on her foot when it ended. Mac was sitting a few feet away, looking just as startled as Alice and me.

  “Damn it, Mac.” There was despair in Alice’s voice. “How could he still want me after seeing that? How could anyone want me?”

  I pulled her toward me until she was on my lap. “You didn’t see all my darkness?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “There was no darkness.”

  “Blind girl. What was it you didn’t want me to see? That you plot and manipulate to get what you want? I’ve been your willing victim. That you’re afraid all of the time? Let me be always there to comfort you and help you be brave.” She had her face buried in my shoulder, not crying, just holding on tight. “Or is it that after two years that you still love your husband and miss him every day? I love you all the more for that. It doesn’t decrease your love for me.”

  “You and Hannah.” She tipped her head back to look at me. “I didn’t know. I tried to drive a wedge between you. That was foolish. It’s like there is a fire consuming you both. How can passion burn that bright? Both of you, near insanity whenever you were together. I could see it there still in you, burning low but still burning. Do you burn like that for me?” She sighed, her cheek against my chest. “I saw it. I saw that you do. I just don’t know why.”

  I kissed her, my hands moving up under her sweatshirt, lifting it up over her head. She leaned back and I kissed her neck, down ac
ross her shoulder to her breasts.

  “You don’t want breakfast first?” Alice asked, looking down at me.

  “I’ll find something to eat in a few minutes. Kind of busy right now.”

  She sighed, a sound that ended in a soft moan. “Don’t let me interrupt you then.”

  We stayed in camp for another two days enjoying our vacation. Alice explored more of the caves with me, we swam in the lake and tromped around the desert. We climbed hills just to hold hands at the top and admire the beauty of the view, trying not to think about the geologic processes that created them. The weather stayed warm and our clothes stayed in our backpacks most of the time. Alice was adorable walking across the sand wearing nothing but hiking boots and a big hat to shield her eyes and helping her put on sunscreen each morning was one of the best parts of my day. Mac was with us most of the time and I don’t know how much his presence was amplifying our feelings but I didn’t care. Alice had been inside my head and she still loved me.

  Two days later the morning sunlight shining through the fabric of the tent gave everything an orange glow. Alice was lying completely on top of me, a tangle of long arms and legs wrapped around my body, her hair covering her face. I watched her sleep, afraid to move. When she woke up some time later, she stretched. It was a slow process that started with her feet, moved up her legs to her hips and ended with her wiggling up higher across my body until her lips were on mine for a good morning kiss.

  “If you wake up every morning like that I will be happy for the rest of my life.” I told her.

  “OK, I can do that.”

  “Are you ready to go back to town today?”

  She considered it for a moment. “Yes and no. The last couple of days I have felt more at peace than I have for a very long time and I don’t want it to end.”

  “It won’t.”

  She gave me a quick kiss, thought about it and then gave me a longer one.

  “I am kind of looking forward to being back in the lab,” she continued. “I want to correlate the information from the canyon that we got on the way here. I’m excited to see what it shows.”

  “I know you are. I can still feel you a little bit in here,” I tapped my head, “even though it’s been two days since we connected. I can’t read your mind, but I feel your emotions.”