Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “I told the guys I wanted to see the male-female ratio around here improved,” answered Catharin. “Which was just a joke, not a very good one. The truth is that the trip took far longer than planned, counting the second leg of it. Cryostasis affected our bodies. Those of us who are younger and female seem to be less affected and recuperate faster. We need an engineer now, not next week or next month. So I urged in no uncertain terms that Orlov be passed over in favor of the alternate. And you got the job. I’m sorry.”

  Becca exhaled. That wasn’t part of the isometric sequence. “I’m not,” she said.

  “Do you feel like walking to the flight deck?”

  “You bet.”

  Becca did not lean on Catharin’s offered arm. She steadied herself on the wall of the connecting corridor a few times as Catharin continued the briefing. “Joel and Bix want to aerobrake when we get to the double planet, provided that the planetfall checklist is done by that time. Otherwise we swing back out and try again in the next orbit.”

  “Why aerobraking? That’s an emergency measure in case of engine trouble or low fuel supply.”

  “The Ship almost exhausted its fuel slowing down enough to stop here.”

  Becca’s mind was now clicking along at nearly its usual operating speed. “If the Ram Maneuver didn’t damage the Ship, looping around a binary dwarf star, we ought to think about doing it in reverse around the double planet. Aerobraking is not the best way to slow down. It’d cause problems like heat stress on the structure. By the way, how many g’s did we pull decelerating from star flight?”

  “Three for one hundred and thirty-two days.”

  “What! That was pushing some safety margins! Just what speed was that decelerating from?”

  “Nine-tenths of the speed of light.”

  Startled, Becca stumbled against the wall. “That’s—faster than any spacecraft ever went.” She reflected. “I guess the Ram Maneuver worked. But I wish you had consulted a structural engineer before you committed the Ship to it.”

  The flight deck was deserted, dark apart from scores of small monitor lights. Stars shone through one slanting deep window. Becca approached the window and stood so close to it that she must have felt the cold from deep space seeping in. Outside and, relative to the spin-gravity, down, the bulk of Aeon curved against the stars. The Ship’s northern hemisphere was aimed at its new sun and brightly illuminated.

  The starship’s hull looked like a battlefield, gouged and scarred with craters. Streaks radiated from some of the craters where the outer shell had been vaporized.

  Becca gasped. “Oh my God! Is any of that damage structural?”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  “Okay. Okay. I take it no thermal leaks and no pressure drops detected by the sensors,” Becca muttered, visibly upset. She crowded against the corners of the window to see a wider portion of the star-blasted hull. “Looks like the hull’s discolored even where it’s not damaged. We knew exposure to interstellar radiation would stain it in time, but that’s so much discoloration that—” Then she asked, “Just how long did we go?”

  Stars wheeled by, and the craters’ faint sun shadows shifted before Catharin found her voice to answer. “We didn’t think it would take so long to keep looking. Becca, the Ship lived up to its name.”

  “Huh? Aeon . . . a thousand years?! Oh, no! That’s why it looks like that!” Shaken, Becca folded her arms across her chest to hug herself. “You just said young female people came out in better shape. But I feel sick around the edges.”

  “Right out of stasis, that’s normal.”

  Becca’s mouth leveled to a straight line, determination, the slight change in expression almost imperceptible in the faint reflected light from the distant sun. “Okay. The only thing to do now is go ahead and get the job done. We’ve got to make planetfall. You were right.”

  “I hope so. What about?”

  “Orlov. He’s by-the-book all the way. That’s a problem when somebody threw the Mission Book out the airlock.”

  “We didn’t throw the Book away,” Catharin said. She sounded defensive to herself. “It’s still what we have to go by.”

  “So where are we in the Checklist?”

  “Day Five. Remember the reservations you had about whether the Checklist could be accomplished in the time frame specified by the Book? Well, it’s been six days since we started on the Checklist. We’re already a day behind.”

  Becca nodded. Arms crossed, feet apart, her stance projected an unlikely sturdiness for such a small and fine-boned woman. It was her willpower showing. “I’ve got to go get something. Then I’ll head for the control center and look for the afterburner button on the Checklist.”

  In a grave mood, Catharin climbed up to the Axis, where with the Ship spinning around it, there was no spin-gravity. She pointed her feet at the north end of the elevator. The elevator picked up speed, gliding southward, and its north end touched her slippers, a tenuous facsimile of gravity.

  A light on the elevator wall signaled passing the transport level, where stored space shuttles awaited call into action. The transport level also had facilities to fabricate aircraft tailored for whatever conditions the new colony planet might present. Reminded of Becca, Catharin felt a fresh pang of anxiety, wondering how their friendship would fare now.

  Catharin exited the ‘vator several signals farther down, on Level Seven. She wheeled into the blue well. Blue was the color code for flight operations. Centrifugal force made its presence known. Catharin compensated without thinking about it, shifted from slithering down the blue well’s ladder to aiming her feet at the rungs and making sure not to let go with both hands at once. At the bottom she stepped off into most of a g of spin-gravity.

  The north polar crew level from which she had just descended could have belonged to any ordinary spaceship, with pigeonhole flight deck, galley, bunk room and so forth. The control center was something else. With its high, curved Big Picture wall above the wide primary stations dais, with the ranks of subsidiary stations under the auxiliary screens, and the two-story observers’ gallery on the farther end, the control center was the theater for a huge drama. Here, one guessed the true size and bulk of Aeon; one sensed the colossal magnitude of the duty of bringing Aeon to a safe future. The spin-gravity weighed on Catharin. She felt slight vertigo.

  Miguel Torres-Mendoza looked up from the Life Systems station that he shared with Catharin. She met his worried, dark eyes with a nod, and waved the A-OK sign to Joel at the Flight station. Joel replied with a wide grin. Lary, hunched over his own work at Astro/Survey, did not look up. Catharin decided to take a seat beside Bix at the Command station until her dizziness went away.

  “She okay?” asked the Captain.

  “Alarmed, but in good shape both mentally and physically. She’s the most resilient human being I’ve ever known.”

  As her dizziness faded, Catharin checked herself for other malaise. Slight queasiness in the recesses of her stomach—more like a disinclination to eat or drink than real illness. This was a distinct improvement over her condition as of one week ago. When she had first come out of stasis, after the Ship found the double planet, she had been too sick to work. So had Bix and Joel. But the three of them had been in stasis twice. Double stasis was double jeopardy.

  So they had lost a day of work. With reinforcements in the form of Miguel Torres-Mendoza, they had managed to keep up with the Checklist since then. The Ship’s Intelligence represented the Checklist as a branching diagram, a tree. The tree’s branches represented the Ship’s systems, its twigs the many subsystems. Each twig could be unpacked to a schematic of the detail behind it. From root to twigs, the tree had to turn from red (needing checking) to amber (check in progress) to green (systems operational) before they entered orbit around the new world.

  Miguel signaled Catharin over to Life Systems. He had pulled up on the screen a schematic of the Ship’s water lines. “I’m concerned about the effects of deceleration on these ancient line
s. Debris may have settled somewhere, causing blockages.”

  Nodding, Catharin pulled up the stasis schematic, ordered a similar check there. The pipes and lines that carried stasis cooling liquid would be equally susceptible to blockage.

  Becca arrived. With hair combed and the flaps and pockets of her flightsuit zipped up, she looked as crisp as ever before. She held a large object, around the sides of which the edges of paper showed: an old-fashioned binder, crammed full.

  Captain Bixby stood. “Welcome up, Engineer. What’s that?”

  “My notes and printouts on the design decisions and stress tests during the Ship’s construction, sir.”

  “Does it also contain information about unapproved procedures and the like?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A Goodie Book, huh. And it must weigh seven pounds if it weighs an ounce. Did it get put in with crew cargo?” Bix asked, his tone severe.

  “No. It was in among my personal effects. And my effects totaled under the weight allotment.”

  Bix cleared his throat. “You had an assigned file in the Ship’s Intelligence. Why did you find it necessary to pack that?”

  Catharin felt distressed at Bix’s severity until she realized that Bix was running a little stress test on Becca.

  Becca replied, “I decided I needed my own backup. I didn’t completely trust large electronic systems over centuries of cold storage.”

  Bix rocked back on his heels in his own version of I’m-thinking-about-this body language. “As a matter of fact, I brought my Goodie Book too.” A smile livened his craggy features. “I’d say you’re well equipped for your job.” Changing gears, Bix said, “You know our pilot, medical officer, and environmental engineer. I don’t believe you’ve met our planetologist. Dr. Lary Siroky-Scheidt.”

  Becca extended a hand to Lary with a smile. “Hi. Becca Fisher.”

  Lary shook her hand, frowning. Without a word, he turned his attention back to whatever he was doing at his console. Ignoring the discourtesy, Becca settled into the Engineering console, turning it on sequence by sequence.

  “Are you still calling yourself Fisher?” inquired Joel, whose last name was now Atlanta, from his place at Flight station.

  “The way I understood it, you changed your last name to commemorate your metropolis of origin, as in Earth’s great cities,” Becca answered. “Which Brightwood, Tennessee, wasn’t.”

  That prompted laughter from Joel and Bix. “You are a long way from the old hometown now, Becca,” said Joel.

  Catharin felt relieved. Joel had found a way to say the truth that needed to be acknowledged—but casually, so that it did not overwhelm them all. We are a long way from home.

  Miguel indicated a window on his half of the workstation that detailed system purging in progress. “If this fails, someone must go to clean the sewer,” he told Catharin.

  A fraction of Catharin’s attention followed the livelier conference between Engineering and Flight. “Did we get a log of impacts? At point-nine c, even a dust grain could have made some of the craters I saw on the leading hemisphere.”

  “Complete log. Let me feed it to you.”

  “Hang on while I crank this up. Okay.”

  Then Joel said, “You better have a look at one of the periscopic views of the hull.” He rattled out a code number.

  “That one correlates with an identifiable hit in log,” Captain Bixby informed Becca. “I think you ought to worry about it.”

  After a pause, Becca said, “You’re right. Captain. I’d like to send out the inspection robots soon.”

  “At your discretion.”

  “Joel, let’s have a look at that activation list,” Becca said. A few minutes later: “Oh, darn. This robot act list has more steps than a hound dog has fleas. Hey, while I digest this, can we see the Big Picture?”

  “Put it on for her,” Bix said.

  One high wall of the control center flickered like a curtain and faded to black. There was space, starrier than any nights of Earth, backdrop for a chip of brilliant orange—the K-class star that was the new sun. And there were the new planets, twin dots, one ice blue, the other a greener blue, like turquoise.

  “Thanks,” said Becca. “I like to see where I’m going.”

  In addition to the astronomical picture, the Ship’s Intelligence had illustrated the double planet’s dance around a common center of gravity. The tandem dots trailed braided threads. The twin planets fascinated Catharin. Not the solitary, barren globe they had found in the last place: here were two worlds for one price.

  Eager, Becca asked, “What’s the axis inclination? Do we know what we’re getting by way of years and days and seasons and if Earth plants and animals will like it?”

  Joel instructed the Intelligence to show more information. Now the green dot bisected a thin line: the planet’s axis of rotation, not quite perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. “The ocean moon stabilizes the tilt of the green planet’s axis,” said Joel. He sounded reverent. “That the axis doesn’t drastically tilt back and forth means that the world has had moderate temperatures, conducive to life. And, with a constant, moderate tilt, there are seasonal variations in climate. Winter and summer and spring and fall.”

  Bix said, “Even if the original target, moon and all, had panned out, it was supposed to be a sketchy biosphere that needed work. But with this one, we may be in luck.” There was something almost plaintive in his gravelly voice. He yearned for luck. “We may just be able to drop into a livable world.”

  Catharin felt the yearning too. This green dot meant more than she had dared hope for. Had evolution on that still-distant planet produced flowers yet?

  “The green planet has a fifty-hour day,” Lary announced.

  Startled, Catharin groped for comprehension, and imagined a tropical place with very long, very still, hot middays. She tried to quell a sharp, knife-edged pang of anxiety.

  “But we’ll stay here and make the best of it,” Lary went on, a harsh edge to his voice, “because we’re at the end of our rope. If we go any farther, we’ll all end up like Seventeen Wedge T!”

  “What?” Becca asked.

  “Freezer mush,” Lary said.

  “What? Everybody?” The tone of Becca’s voice made Catharin move to intervene, too late. Becca had paled. The freckles across her nose and cheekbones stood out in vivid contrast.

  Lary started, “It seems that the cooler—”

  Catharin interrupted him. “Shut up, that’s enough.” She went to Becca’s side. “Did you know somebody in Seventeen T?”

  “A family. A family of four. All gone?”

  As gently as she could, Catharin explained, “A machine malfunction caused temperature fluctuations across the entire compartment. Everyone in that compartment died. They didn’t suffer.” Catharin put an arm around Becca’s shoulders, furious at Lary. This bombshell of bad news should not have been dropped on anybody just out of overlong stasis—much less the engineer whose judgment could make or break the Ship.

  In a deathly silence in the control center, Becca swallowed hard. She wiped a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand.

  Nobody turned off the Big Picture. The blue planet and the green one waltzed on. The Ship was a tiny mote on the tip of a vectorial line that pointed toward the bright orange sun.

  Aeon hurtled toward planetfall. Drawn on the Big Picture, the Ship’s vector was like a javelin. That represented only a fraction of the velocity at which the Ship had left the dwarf stars on the way out of the Ramamirtham Maneuver.

  7 Damages

  New stars appeared, shifted out of infrared into the visible spectrum. Stars already visible coruscated toward blue. Bluing stars crowded ahead, toward the Ship’s line of travel, until half the universe of stars compacted into one mass of brilliance. The unearthly image did not change, but a shimmer cycled around the edges of it.

  “How eerie,” Catharin murmured. She had come to the Captain’s office to ask for a blood sample, but he had wanted
her to see this first: a replay of the acceleration to relativistic speed. The Ship’s Intelligence had compiled this sequence, based on the observations of the auto-observatory, but presented as if the Ship had accelerated in a simple straight line rather than executing the complicated loops around the binary dwarf star.

  “That shimmer’s an artifact of the intensity of the light, not a function of the relativistic effect,” said Bix. “Anyway, that’s what it looked like to the Ship at point-nine c. Why’s it seem so familiar to me?”

  “Because you read somewhere what the universe would look like at most of the speed of light?”

  He grunted, not in the way that meant affirmative. “It’s more like déjà vu, something I’ve seen before. But how the hell could I have seen it? I was frozen tight. Do people dream in stasis?”

  “No. The brain activity isn’t there. People do dream on the way in and out, in the twilight stages.”

  That shimmer gave the relativistic universe the illusory look of a tunnel of light. It suddenly struck Catharin as familiar to her, too. Before she could guess why, Bix said, “Forward to deceleration.”

  The mass of light exploded. Stars cascaded from massed brilliance to their natural colors, spacings and luminosity. Bix said, “The Ship tweaked data out of that mass of light. Deciphered the mess into this double planet when we were a sixth of a light-year out—barely in time to decelerate. I’d sure as hell like to know why it took so long to find a tweak good enough to stop for! Wasn’t there a planet with a moon before now? Go ahead,” he sighed, “take my blood.”

  Catharin drew a vial of blood from his hairy, sinewy arm.

  Bix continued to brood. “Back there at that sorry excuse for a terraformable planet with the moon that wasn’t there, when we twiddled with the parameters, we thought we were just asking the Ship to look for a slightly greener world. I think we were messing in territory inside the damn computer brain that we didn’t understand. The Ship concluded it had to hold out for green with a capital G.”