Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Aaron groaned. “Did anybody bring a flashlight?”

  Wing took a thin flashlight out of the pouch on his belt and pulled the skein of roots back like a curtain.

  “Don’t go too far—you don’t have the equipment for a cave search,” Becca said.

  Aaron nodded. “We’ll simply check it out. The two of you wait.”

  “Not here,” said Catharin. “We’ll be at the pool. If you call out, we can hear you from there.”

  “You think it’s as clean as it looks?”

  “I’m sure it’s cleaner than the fungus in the ravine.”

  Becca washed her hands in the pool as directed.

  “I’m worried about you being exposed to some kind of environmental toxin. Right now, you’re more vulnerable than anyone else.”

  “I’m glad I went to church this morning.” Becca sat down beside the water.

  The slow sun had climbed high enough to send a beam slanting toward the water’s surface, from which it reflected, dazzling to the eye. This might be the prettiest place on the Mountain, with clear blue water and ferns frilling the wall near the waterfall, a shining ribbon of water. Trees with fan-shaped leaves surrounded the pool. On the other side of the pool lay a scalloped bank of land, grass-green in the sunlight, which looked sensuously inviting, a perfect place to make love. Catharin shuddered with unmet, maybe hopeless, physical need.

  Becca sat bunched up and anxious. She pressed her clenched fist against her lips. “I know they’ve got more sense than to go too far in and get lost themselves. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Should we look for them?”

  “No. I will not let you expose yourself to a cave where there might be toxic slime. It’s only been ten minutes.” Catharin felt deeply fatigued. She leaned against a big rock, closing her eyes. The purl of the water sounded like a serene, sibilant voice. Catharin found herself listening to it, imagining words.

  28 Lost Soul

  Joe blundered into a small fern tree and heard the soft snap of a frond breaking off. The forest was murky in the starlight, and he had been running like a madman. His chest heaved for breath. His legs ached.

  The fern forest fragmented the world beyond it. The fragments showed him what he expected: a rocky edge like the rim of a pool. He pushed his way out of the fern trees, eager to find the water. At the last instant he realized that he’d stepped onto a steep slope. He tried to catch himself by grabbing a fern trunk. The trunk bent over and he lost his grip on it as he fell. Feet first, he skidded downward. He scrabbled for handholds but only dislodged stones. Landing hard on rocks and softer things, he shook with the adrenaline fired during the fall.

  Joe picked himself up, wincing at bruised flesh and bone. He looked around at the ravine. Maybe this was Wing’s pool after all—it did have high curved rock walls—but if so, the water had drained out of it. Joe was vaguely aware that some bodies of water in cave country alternately filled and drained, or siphoned, their water disappearing into the bowels of the earth. So much for a swim, Joe thought bitterly.

  He flashed his light on damp rock walls, across which crawled two, make that three, zucchini slugs—small green ones with shiny dots on their skin and bristly, sticky feet. Near the slugs a black patch of wall resisted his flashlight. Joe finally realized that it was a recess partially screened by roots. The flashlight didn’t find a back wall in the recess. So make that a cave.

  What kind of cave? Large, small, shallow, deep, flooded—? He yanked the roots to one side and flashed the beam of his flashlight deeper into the cave. A long passageway slanted down like a mouth with a deep gullet. Joe forced his way in, making the roots emit a strange bruised smell. He proceeded twenty or so feet into the cave, stumbling once or twice on roots underfoot.

  Joe stopped at a low rib in the cave roof. The cave went on and down. Shivering, he zipped up his jacket and remembered the warm bedclothes in the Penthouse. He also remembered the terrible stars and the baleful moon and suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of turning his face toward them again. He ducked under the low spot and went down, driven by an impulse he didn’t understand.

  The cave turned into a passageway laced and rimmed with roots. The fern forest trees above here looked too small to send roots down this far—but there they were. Large and small roots wound around bumpy irregularities in the rocks. The bumps were fossils, stone seashells by the look of them. Ancient shells with elaborate frills and whorls that made them resemble flowers.

  Finally Joe stopped, breath sawing in his chest. Far enough? He snapped off his flashlight. Sure enough, no light of moon or stars came this far. It was as smoothly dark as black velvet down here.

  But—

  The hair stood up on Joe’s head as his brain registered dim green patches of light in the corner of his eye. Nerves jangling, Joe glanced around. The faint lights vanished when he stared at them, reappeared in his peripheral vision, and had familiar shapes. They were roots, coated with goo, and the goo glowed in the dark: more of the phosphorescent, parasitic lower life of Green.

  Maybe he’d better stand still a few minutes and get his physical, and especially mental, balance back.

  So this was the nasty insides of this world that never got anywhere. Flowerlike shells must have filled clean blue seas in the past; there must have been oceanic meadows of those shells to lay down this many fossils, between climatic catastrophes when the then-lonely world’s axis toppled over. Roots, limned with stinking slime that glowed in the dark, fingered the seashells. But here, as above, there was no evidence of intelligent life. Evolution whip-sawed by climatic change had never made it up that far.

  Joe grew aware of a weak breeze and odor in his face, not the sharp smell of broken roots at the cave entrance. Fainter and more puzzling to the nose, it wafted from the depths of the cave. He felt a sick curiosity about how far down into worldwide futility the cave went. He turned his flashlight back on and continued downward. The descent of the passageway was ridged with thick roots. Goo lined the roots, stood up in ripples on the top edges. Joe’s upper lip curled in disgust.

  Suddenly, and for no good reason, the faint odor in the air reminded Joe of Aunt Adrian’s chow-chow relish, supper in the fall, being in school and so much brighter than everyone else that it was an agony and glory, all of the young days Mom and Dad and Daddy knew that he’d be a scientist and were proud of him—

  Joe staggered forward under the unexpected weight and the immediacy of memory. His feet splashed into water deeper than his shoes. Water, dark and shiny, spread out in front of him as far as his flashlight beam went. Wavelets lapped his shoes and licked the shore beside him. He thought he smelled salt in the air. On a whim, he stooped to trail a finger into the water, and tasted it. Salty! This was the sea.

  The world’s tide engine could probably drive the sea way, way inland, given a favorable geometry of whatever underground channels connected this water to the sea. Joe felt dazzled with understanding. He backed out of the water, noticing that his feet splashed without the echo he would have expected in a narrow cave. Wrapped up in the incredibly vivid recollection of his childhood, he’d walked out of the passageway, into a much wider space without realizing it. The sea came up into the darkness under the mountain in a lightless bay.

  He couldn’t see walls in any direction, just a ridge of stone on his left. It looked as solid as a harbor rock, and as sea-scoured, with scalloped edges. Hoping for a better view, Joe climbed the ridge.

  His new vantage point suggested a huge cavern looming beyond the limits of his feeble light. The rock he stood on reached out into the wide dark water like a finger. Dimly visible were other ridges like this one, fingers of rock interlaced with fingers of water, rock cavern and sea holding hands in the dark.

  The sample on his fingertip had tasted like clean seawater, but something down here wasn’t so fresh. The air hinted of rotten fish soup and then some. The complex smell reminded him of Mike’s aftershave before he and Jean-Claude went out for the night—

  A
nd his own ten-year-old words: Why couldn’t I have had a normal dad, not two queers? The hurt of that remark had lingered a long time in their house. But they forgave him because they loved him—

  A fragment of Joe’s consciousness railed at him for standing here on top of a skinny ridge underground, crying like a ten-year-old boy. He sat down and turned off the flashlight, wrapped his arms around his knees, and stared across the blackness of the water. He felt the dark weight of the mountain above him.

  After a few moments it dawned on him that a dim canopy of light stretched over the subterranean water. Joe jumped up, almost losing his balance. If that was the roof, glowing in great wide swaths, it was vast. The shining swaths looked like roots, rounded and knobby. But by the size they should have been the roots of a tree as big as a hill.

  It probably wasn’t against the laws of nature to have a high ratio of root to tree trunk. Or a high ratio of frill to snail house in a seashell. No more than it was against the same laws to have high very stable nucleic acids, so that the mutability of organisms was strikingly low compared to life on Earth. But he wondered what it meant. Nature everywhere he’d studied it had a fractal aspect, patterned chaos, with patterns tending to repeat.

  Then Joe saw the stars.

  Stars, below, a constellation of them. The sight jolted him. No. No. That couldn’t be. Had the stars hunted him down? More likely, was he hallucinating? Morbidly compelled to find out, he turned his flashlight on and went looking for the fallen stars. He skidded down the opposite side of the ridge from the side he’d climbed up. Along the scalloped, scoured-looking base of the ridge, his feet crunched in shingle until he entered a dry depression littered with debris spilled from a great pile of rock and root farther out into the cavern. The debris didn’t look like the rest of the smooth-edged, cleanly curved, rock shapes in this place, and there were some pieces of root tangled in too. None of the mess resembled stars.

  He turned the flashlight off. When he let his eyes adjust, the stars had come back. They were in the debris in the depression.

  Of course, the stars really had come down from the cosmos in the form of Aeon’s shuttleplane with its bomb that blasted the mountaintop, and shook the mountain to its roots. The bomb had caused rockfalls in this underground cavern. Joe’s skin crawled. He snapped the light back on.

  He almost dropped the flashlight in the shock of seeing long, white bones right in front of him.

  The bones in the dry bowl added up to something that wasn’t remotely human. The long tangle of bone was half buried in debris. A wide flat beak or snout gaped open in a soundless agony full of fine teeth.

  Teeth?! But this was Green. There weren’t supposed to be animals here. This didn’t make sense to his rational mind. It made perfect sense to Joe’s crocodile brain, which screamed a red alert. If there was a skeletal monster with sharp teeth, there could be live ones stalking him in the darkness—

  Joe swept the flashlight in all directions. Nothing lurked behind his back; his flashlight beam swept over barren rock and shingle. But the beam was puny in this cavern, and his imagination could populate the dark with monsters.

  With gooseflesh on the back of his neck, Joe turned back to examine the skeleton. He noted the delicate fanfold of bones of a flipper. It was a swimmer, a sea-thing—its kind would not pounce on him from the rocks. Relieved, the crocodile brain downgraded the alert to yellow.

  Dry, white stuff that looked like salt ringed the depression. At some point in the past, it had been a shallow pool with a creature in it. Maybe at a very specific point in the past, Joe thought, with a sense of dismay thickening in the pit of his stomach. Maybe it happened when the Vanguard had blasted the mountaintop. Loosened rock cascaded from the roof of the cavern and cut the pool off from the water. The creature died. Its pool evaporated.

  Joe crept closer. He found the bones covered with busy little insects feeding on the dry scraps of flesh clinging to the bones. Things happen slowly on Green; it might take a year to decompose a large creature. On the other hand, maybe it took the creature months to die, trapped on the wrong side of the rockfallthe rocks. Joe felt a horrible sense of empathy knifing through him, a convulsive shudder.

  In the end, it was a bioenergy windfall for the sarcophagal insects. Their phosphorescent lights were turned up bright and visible even in the flashlight beam. These were his stars.

  Alongside the star-spangled bones of the skeleton lay several strings of dodecahedral beads. As fascinated as he was horrified, Joe crouched to see better, closer. He’d seen a beaded string of dodecahedrons not long before. Maybe one of Maya London’s India necklaces—? Joe shook his head: that wasn’t it.

  The skeleton’s long, curved spine consisted of big blocks of the same shape, dodecahedral. That made the bead strings—

  Little ones. The creature had been pregnant, or whatever equivalent its alien metabolism entailed, when it was trapped behind the rockfall.

  The skeleton reminded him of a seal. The braincase, if that was what it was, was large. Here was a higher form of life than they’d known was on Green, maybe one with real brains, and the first thing they’d done had made it suffer and die. With its several young.

  Wing had had moral qualms about blasting the mountain all along. Joe owed Wing an apology. As a representative of Homo sapiens, maybe he owed the bony skeleton of the Green-seal an apology too. “I’m sorry,” Joe said.

  Joe suddenly became aware of a faint rushing sound. He stiffened, remembering that Wing said the tidal bore had been audible in the river before it came upon him. It had sounded like distant surf, according to Wing.

  Joe felt numb. He sat down on a lumpy, raw-faced rock and turned off his light to wait for the tide.

  The rush of water got louder, slowly. In the darkness, Joe studied the shape of the roof, vaulted by the glowing roots. He also gradually discerned the damage on this end of the cavern. The roof had broken; vast roots dangled down, pointed accusingly at more rockfalls, three or four that Joe could see from here. Blasting the mountain had damaged the cavern and torn holes in the fabric of a weird, un-Earthlike and unparklike ecology.

  The peculiar smell in the air was much stronger here than it had been up on the rocks. Maybe it came from the decomposing Green-seal. It coated Joe’s tongue.

  Suddenly the smell tasted exactly like the fruit-fly breeding room at the university. He had been sixteen years old when he learned how to do recombinant DNA, changing fruit flies into interesting little monsters, creating novel organisms and an unprecedented argument at home. It’s immoral! Aunt Adrian snapped.

  I’m good at it!

  Mike crossed his arms. With your brains, you could be a doctor. Something useful to society.

  After that Joe had spent more time on the World Net, using the Net nickname of Changer. He spent more time with women, too. Their scents came back to him now.

  Like they were a monkey on his back, he couldn’t shake the odor-triggered memories off his mind. He doubled over with misery.

  The rush turned into an unmistakable wave sound, sharp breaking surf that jolted Joe back to the present. Belatedly Joe realized that this was not the place to wait to meet the tide. The skeleton was high and dry. He’d stay that way too. Feeling foolish, Joe stood up.

  The breeze of the tide blew into Joe’s face. With it came a new gust of smell. Less cloying than the stink of the dead creature, this one was neither pleasant nor rotten so much as indescribable.

  Joe felt his way toward the sea and the odd odor, clambering up another curve-edged rock ridge. On the far side of the ridge lay another depression, but this one contained water in a rounded shore. Joe cautiously waded in, finding the shore sloping gently under the water. In the middle of the pool, the water came up to his knees. He was ironically aware that he’d finally found a pool of sorts, but not the idyllic one described by Wing. This one was shallow and unsatisfactory. And it had a smell like nothing his nose had ever met. His brain threw out olfactory identifications like cards dealt
from a deck. Pineapple! Cat box! Liniment!

  The beam of his light danced on the far side of the pool—a barricade of rocks and roots. More rock- and root-fall. Water seethed through the barrier, but it had blocked the tide’s wave. As Joe looked, a small cascade of broken rocks trickled into the water.

  He had overheard Raj and Aaron talking yesterday about some seismic activity in the mountain, maybe subterranean rockfall. So this rockfall might be considerably fresher than the others. For that matter, it might not be over.

  Before he could process that thought and decide whether to retreat before rocks fell on his head, Joe’s leg struck something soft. He shone the light down. He recoiled from two huge dark eyes.

  The large, flat-snouted head flinched from the light. The rest of the big dark shape lurched away from Joe as fast as he jumped away from it.

  Standing well back on the shore, he pointed the light at the creature in the pool. It cowered in the deepest part of the pool, shaking so hard that the water rippled. Longer than Joe was tall, thicker than his shoulders were wide, it watched him fixedly, eyes barely up out of the water, blinking.

  Joe put the flashlight behind his back. That way enough light bounced off the rock ridge for him to see the creature without blinding it.

  With a flick of membrane, a huge third eye opened on the creature’s forehead, a wide moist orb. It shut immediately. Even indirect, the flashlight was too bright for it.

  A third eye adapted to the faintly luminescent darkness under the world? Maybe the other two eyes were for daylight, maybe it usually lived at sea. He remembered the image from Kite that didn’t act like a school of fish and could have been an animal swimming in the river from the sea. Would a creature like this swim in here from the sea to give birth? There might be advantages to a sea creature of birthing young in an inland cavern. It depended on how many predators there were out in the open water.