by C. Gockel
“You’d respect me if I said yes, wouldn’t you?”
Catharin could hear naked need for her respect in his voice. Becca could hear it too. Her eyes widened with compassion. Catharin trembled with anger. “You told me that a few months ago—and I did respect you for it!”
The cup Joe held shook in his grip. “I accepted the deal because Pang-Park offered me a playground just to keep me fresh. There’s a lot in life that didn’t bother me, Doctor, as long as I could make interesting things.”
A sudden gust of wind blew napkins and swampcress shreds around. Nobody moved to chase the napkins. Catharin felt hot anger and icy dismay at the same time, and her fists clenched.
“But the thing he wanted me to do made me sick. After a while I couldn’t stand it any more. Simple as that. That’s why I’m here.” Joe jerked his head toward Domino. “Short enough?”
The door from the base to the observation deck suddenly opened. Kay Montana stood there. “Done yet?”
Aaron expelled a deep breath and ran a hand though his hair. “I had nothing else planned but a final toast.”
“There’s a storm blowing in. You’re all about to get drenched, and I need people to help push the shuttle into the lee of the base.”
“Of course.” Aaron hastily lifted his cup, by the handle, like an ordinary cup.
“Hold it!” said Sam. “A little rain isn’t going to hurt us, and we’re not finished. Kay, use horsepower, not people. Dig our man Alvin Crawford out of the machine shop in the hangar. He can tow the shuttle with a jeep.” Kay departed. “We’re not going to be a bunch of ignorant children—” Sam put her hands on her hips. “—who don’t know what to ask! That man just said a project horrified him. He’s not squeamish. Meddling with the germ line was fine by him—lost no sleep over that—no matter the life expectancy of the finished product, right?”
“That did matter to me,” Joe insisted. “But when I altered the germ line, I enjoyed it.” He shot Catharin a daggery blue glance.
Catharin had not known it was possible to feel this angry. And Joe was barely two feet away from her. She held the edge of the table to keep from yielding to an impulse to hit him.
“If nobody else is going to ask the question, I will,” said Sam. “What would have taken you the rest of your life and mind, but made you sick to the bottom of your soul, Joseph Devreze?”
Joe looked up at the approaching storm made of clotted dark clouds with sunset-stained, bloody edges. His jaw was clenched so hard that muscles corded on his neck.
Wing walked around the table to put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “The unspeakable? But in the end you did not do it—and you do get cosmic credit for that, Joe. What was it?”
Joe said in a low voice, “To get death out of the human genome.”
Catharin groped for meaning. There had been two kinds of old, powerful people. Miranda and Pang-Park. One kind imagined a better future, trained a younger generation to attain it, built Aeon. Pang-Park—
“He was an old man who didn’t want to die? How selfish!” said Maya.
Joe said, “Selfish as hell, but not in the way you mean. He already had the benefit of every rejuvenation therapy and every single-gene-replacement longevity treatment ever devised. What he wanted from me was germ line alteration so humans wouldn’t have to die. But it was all wrong.”
Catharin’s voice came out with a sharp, out-of-control edge. “Wrong? How could you think saving lives is wrong?”
“You don’t understand, Doctor!” His voice was thick with feeling. “It would have violated something basic. Raped nature.” He stumbled like a bull in a china shop of words. “The genes want change and chimeras and disease, not fixity. The human genome wants to change, and I helped it. But to make it not die, I would have had to kill it. Death is a part of life.”
Only now did what Joe was saying sink in for Catharin. Humans who didn’t die—at all?
Would such beings still be human?
Sam nodded emphatically. “Good man!”
Catharin felt stunned. The desires of human genes felt important to him, but not the welfare of human beings?
“The death angel passed over,” said Wing, “and the image of death is an angel, though a terrible one.”
It began to rain. Aaron said emphatically, “Drink! L’chaim! To life!”
Catharin gulped her beer as rain spattered on the deck and on the table. And the taste of the beer reminded her not of beer at all but of hospitals, of the critical care ward where the victims of savage viruses writhed and bled and festered to death. Then rain poured down. Aaron’s guests rushed toward the door to the conference room. Sam, however, stood there like a rock in a stream, looking up into the rain and letting it puddle in her cupped hands.
Becca veered to Joe’s side and spoke to him. Domino ran over to pull her away from him. Becca shook Domino off as Joe stalked away toward the outside stairs down to the ground. Becca hurried to Catharin. “At first I thought it was rain on Joe’s face, but it’s tears! You better go talk to him!”
“He can jump into the river,” Catharin snapped.
“Didn’t you hear me? He’s crying. He’s hurt, and you’re the doctor!” Becca shoved Catharin with surprising force toward the stairs.
But I’m not that kind of doctor! She was already soaked to the skin, and thunder rumbled in the sky, and she had never felt so close to hating Joe, but she followed him down the stairs and across the open ground. He cornered around the hangar. She did too. Why am I doing this?
Joe stumbled into the little valley behind the hangar. He seemed uncoordinated, or not to be seeing clearly, and stopped between the flat rock and the furry pine that grew there. In the patter of rain he did not hear her approach. She was about to rap his shoulder to get his attention when he drew his hand back in a fist, aiming an all-out blow at the tree’s bole. Without thinking, Catharin caught his hand. Joe’s force caused her skid toward the tree. Her shoulder banged into the bole. They both gasped. Joe grabbed her upper arms. “Did I hurt you?!”
“That would have broken your hand!”
He shook her. “What else could I have done??”
“Hit something softer, or throw things, but don’t hurt yourself!”
“That isn’t what I mean!” he shouted.
“Then tell me what you do mean!” she yelled back.
“What else could I have done but leave Earth?” he demanded, face close to hers.
She put her hands on his chest and shoved him back. “You need to know right now?”
“Yes!”
It rained harder. A sodden wisp of hair fell in her eyes. “Didn’t you have friends in the industry, other places where you could have worked?”
Joe shook his head so hard that water flew off his hair. “It’s a competitive business, Doctor. And I was a competitive SOB. Didn’t have a lot of allies in the industry and at work. And Pang-Park was one of the most powerful men on Earth.” He turned away, making fists.
“Joe, no!” She flung her arms around him from behind, grabbing his wrists, afraid that he would strike the tree or the rock.
He threw himself into a crouch, covering his face with his hands. Since she didn’t let go of his wrists, she was dragged down too, her feet slid out from under her, and she ended up sitting on the ground behind him, dazed at his sheer physical power.
“Mike didn’t like the idea of genetic engineering. But Mike was a cop. Jean-Claude was a poet. They didn’t know science. Oh, God, I miss them! How could I have shut them out?”
His voice rose while Catharin thought, Who is he talking about? There was a flash of lightning; thunder crackled almost immediately. And Joe screamed in raw despair. Twice. Without the thunder masking his screams, they would have brought people running out of Unity Base in alarm.
“Oh dear God!” Catharin whispered through clenched teeth.
“What else could I have done?” His voice was hoarse. “Tell me! Tell me!”
She felt surrounded by a minefield.
“You know the easy answer. You could have found freedom in the work. But you couldn’t do that.”
His shoulders shook. She moved her hands onto his, tried to unclench his mud-streaked fingers, and when she did, his hands clamped around hers and drew them to his chest. With her face pressed between his shoulder blades, she felt grief racking him.
Mud streamed around their knees. “Doctor, I never thought you’d join me in the dirt,” he said.
She swallowed hard. “Me either.”
“Do you care about me?” The voice was hoarse—strained by the screams he’d let out.
Catharin still wanted to slap him for his arrogance, his cavalier attitude toward human well-being. Yet: not when he was this miserable. She nodded against his back.
“Pang-Park used a beautiful woman to tempt me to stay and work for him,” Joe whispered. “I thought she liked me. A lab tech tipped me off that Pang-Park had set it up.”
She knew the next question was going to be loaded. And it was.
“Would you make love to me in order to use me?”
“No! That idea is abhorrent to me.”
“How about the obverse? Love me without using me?”
Something inside her had known that it would come to this. In our hour of need, he won’t cooperate. Damn his impossible—pathological—arrogance. But that didn’t change the fact of attraction, or the overwhelming intensity of it. Catharin gritted her teeth.
“Long silence, Doctor. The answer is no, eh?”
“The answer is yes, I would love you without using you, but not in the dirt. Get up!” He let her pull him up and shove him down to sit on the edge of the rock. She sat beside him, wrapping her arms around him. In his ear, she snapped, “I will not let you be less of a hero, less sane, than you can.”
“Won’t let me be less than you want me to be?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. I said what I mean.I’ve had lovers too. Never has a lover done all for me that I wanted, because I don’t pick spineless ones.” She paused to catch her breath. “But if I have to be the voice of your conscience, and it does sound like you need one, I will!”
Incredibly, under that tongue-lashing, the knotted muscles in his back and shoulders relaxed. She rubbed her chin against him, feeling the softening. His hair hung in dark damp ringlets. Her lips brushed a cool wet lock on his warm neck.
“When would you like to start reforming me?”
“Not now.”
He turned her hand over and kissed her palm.
Catharin’s mind reeled. There couldn’t have been enough alcohol in the beer to cause that. It was him, her physical attraction to him. She wanted him like nothing and no one she’d ever known before. She released a sharp sigh, then wrapped her hand around his neck and kissed him on the side of his face.
A shudder ran through him. Then she realized that he was crying, sobs tumbling out of him. Appalled that he sounded so brokenhearted, she rocked him back and forth.
It got darker. Her adrenaline ebbed. She simmered with desire, anger, and hurt on the inside, but felt chilled on the outside. The skin of Joe’s neck was warm where she put her cheek against it.
Parts of the evening replayed in her mind. She remembered boiling over at Aaron’s table. Joe’s collar was near her lips; she closed her teeth on the soft material in mortification, remembering how everybody, including Joe, had been more in tune, less incoherent, or had at least asked good questions.
Suddenly Catharin knew her own question, unasked, not even imagined until this moment.
Joe had said he refused to undo death in the genome.
Did that mean he had seen how to do that?
26 Night Circles
Catharin disliked the long dark “days” of Green: even in summer, they got cold and seemed endless. This one was more hateful than usual. The rain made the air cool, and having been chilled to the bone in the rain with Joe, Catharin never really warmed up.
She worked on a report to encrypt for transmission up to the Ship. The report consisted of medical information about Becca’s pregnancy. Listening to the endless, soft night wind, Catharin toyed with the idea of going up to the Ship herself. But she could not leave the Base without a physician. It would take an astoundingly good reason to have someone else substituted for her. A better reason than the amalgam of: I embarrassed myself with the crowd down here and I’m tired of long dark nights and I want to personally care for Becca and be Joe’s conscience.
In the deep darkness of midday, she received an encrypted transmission back from the Ship. It came from Joel.
Ours is going to be born in less than a month, and the birth mother’s agreed to give him the name I suggested. He’ll be named John, after John the Baptist, who was born to parents who were too old bear children.
Still no medical reason to suspect a problem, Catharin surmised. Maybe Joe had been imagining things. Did he really know the difference between life and death at that level? Could he really feel a trace of deadly change somewhere in a human chromosome?
She did not ask. Joe seemed to be himself today, sarcasm and all. “Sam’ll probably have you stand in a circle and chant at the moon,” Joe informed her.
Catharin had only the vaguest idea of what Sam had in mind for the women, and did not look forward to it. She had no idea at all what Eddy had planned for the men. “And perhaps the rest of you will be howling at the moon.”
“I doubt it. Eddy’s no alpha male.”
After supper, the Ship transmitted a conference on Blue, new findings about the artificial islands. Catharin slipped in at the last minute, when the lights were already out and Blue on a black field shone on the back wall of the conference room, the Base’s own Little Picture.
As she glided into a chair in the last row, Catharin heard a scratchy voice slightly too loud to qualify as discreet. “Sounds like last night turned into quite a shindig. So Snow White has a temper after all?”
Raj North’s voice replied, “Remember, Alvin, she’s the doc. That means scalpels. If you value your balls, better watch your tongue.” Both men snickered.
Catharin crossed her arms, glad that the gloom hid her blush.
Lary and Joel were windowed into the picture to provide commentary. Lary said, “This is an artificial, cloudless image of Blue. Note the islands, and the vaguely geometrical way they seem to be arrayed on the globe. Now, I’ve done a historical reconstruction given so many millions of years of weathering. The storms are worse in Blue’s temperate latitudes, in fact, severe enough to have worn some islands completely down below the waves. So, with radar scanning from Lodestar, I looked for submerged seamounts in certain places.”
Catharin’s attention strayed to Joel. The dignity of command sat well on his even, coffee-and-cream-complected features. Catharin briefly closed her eyes in tired amazement. Her attraction to Joe was more intense than ever, yet had done absolutely nothing to make Joel less attractive. In fact, the now-Commander’s emotional stability struck her as extremely desirable.
Catharin was jarred back to the here and now by surprised murmurs around her. On the picture, Blue looked dramatically different, exquisitely patterned with gray dots. Lary said, “As you can see, two hundred million years ago Blue’s mountains were as geometrical as the segments of an orange—though not quite that simple.”
Joel made a low whistle of amazement. “It’s neat as a Christmas tree ornament.”
“No plate tectonics or planetary processes known to us—or guessed at, for that matter—would have given that result. At some point in the distant past, Blue was planeformed on a massive scale according to a rather elaborate master plan.” Lary beamed at them. “Questions?”
“Lots,” said Sam. “But the big one is why?”
Lary shrugged. “That’s for our archaeologists, of which I imagine we have one or two in the freezer, despite the fact that it was not assessed as a mission-useful vocation. . . . But we think this was done elsewhere in the galaxy, and that Blue wandered between the stars fo
r ages. So your answer may be lost in the mists of time and interstellar space.”
“How can you be sure it wasn’t terraformed in situ? Right here?” said Sam.
“That raises more questions than it answers. If Blue has been here all along, it’s spinning too fast and orbiting too close. Planetary evolution should have left it phase-locked with Green and located considerably farther away than it is, long before life reached the point of development we see on Green.”
Catharin’s attention had been riveted to Joel before, but now she listened raptly to Lary along with everyone else. Then it dawned on her that his color did not look right. Nor did the loose texture of his skin.
“We haven’t seen even an infinitesimal trace of life down there, much less civilization,” said Joel. “We’ve detected no radio signals from Blue except from lightning noise and the magnetosphere. Nobody interfered with the drone when it flew down either. Nobody’s home.”
“My friends, the absolute most recent date for Blue’s remodeling is two hundred million years ago. That happens to be a short time for a planet,” said Lary. “But rather long for a sentient species. On Earth, our species came into existence one hundred thousand years ago. A couple of hundred million years ago, the first mammals were scuttling around the feet of the dinosaurs!” Lary waved his hands and laughed. Midlaugh, he lapsed into a coughing fit.
Catharin quietly left, going back to Medical, intent on contacting the hospital Upstairs, asking them if Lary Siroky-Scheidt had fallen ill. In the hallway in front of Medical, Joe stepped in front of her. Startled, she jumped.
He put a hand on her arm, not circling it, so she could shake him off if she wanted to. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’ve got something on my mind. I think a friend of mine Upstairs is sick, and I didn’t know about it.”
His face hardened. “Were you coming to discuss that with me?”
“No. Honest. I just had to know more from the Ship. Please don’t blame me for hoping!” Tears sprang up in the corners of her eyes.
