by C. Gockel
“Hell, no. I’m just ashamed of being always the changer, but never the changed. I’d still damn well rather keep being the way I’ve always been, though.”
Cross-legged on the bunk, Wing folded his hands in his lap. “Welcome to the human race.”
A distinctive blend of smells and sounds, gravity and light constituted the familiar environment of the Ship, but with a patina of unfamiliarity from her long absence. Catharin privately noted this and put it aside to think about later, focusing on Becca, who lay in a bed in the Ship’s hospital in Outtown. Becca had just recovered wavering consciousness. Pale, her skin drawn tightly over the bones of her face, she looked up at Catharin. “Did I get sick? On the shuttle up?”
“Yes,” Catharin said, and spared her the details.
It had looked like anaphylactic shock—out of the blue, at the maximum acceleration of the shuttle. Becca had lapsed into unconsciousness. Her vital signs had quickly faded. Catharin risked an injection of atropine. Which probably saved Becca’s life, even as it triggered a cascade of unintended consequences. By the time they got to the Ship, Becca was violently ill.
Becca closed her eyes. Tears trickled out. “I lost it, didn’t I?”
“Not the way you mean.”
Becca’s eyelids snapped open. She touched her abdomen under the blanket. “I don’t feel right.”
“What happened to you was something like Rh incompatibility—a violent allergy to the fetus. The onset may have been triggered by the stress of the shuttle’s acceleration.” Redheads tend to have allergies—but not like this. One of a potentially vast number of unpleasant medical surprises in store for us. In store for me. “The fetus was successfully transferred to another woman. At three months, that’s not a difficult procedure with modern medicine. But she will be the birth mother, not you.”
Slight, conflicting expressions shifted across Becca’s face. “I need to think about that.”
Catharin pulled the covers up to Becca’s chin. It was cooler in the Ship than a summer day in Unity Base. “Do that. I have a couple of other visits to make here.”
For temporary relief from grim medical matters, Catharin stepped out onto the balcony at the end of the hall. The balcony overlooked Outtown. After more than a thousand years of changeless preservation in a nitrogen atmosphere, Outtown had been pressurized with Earthlike air while Catharin was away. Water flowed in a fountain. Plants fringed some of the sidewalks, looking scanty. Catharin wondered if the plants were failing to thrive, or simply new-planted seedlings.
Since the hospital had been operational long before Outtown had oxygen in its air, the balcony was glassed in. A wall of glass stood between Catharin and the promise of a city. She wondered if it ever would be a city in the fullest sense: well ordered but lively, grounded on democracy and tolerance, with a populace healthy and long-lived enough to systematically explore both the cosmos and the inner universe of the human soul. Catharin sighed. This future city had been easier for her to imagine while the Ship was in Earth orbit, before its journey took it to unexpected and disastrous ends.
Changing into clean paper coveralls before going into the pediatric unit, Catharin thought, How self-indulgent of me to come here; this is not a patient of mine.
But she wanted to see this one for herself.
It had been a bad twenty-four hours since the shuttle docked at the Ship. She’d lain awake during the Ship’s quiet night, shaking with the feelings that had had to be suppressed while she was fending death away from her best female friend. Never had she had a critically ill patient who was so close to her personally. There was, of course, a first time for everything.
In the middle of the same distressed night, John Mark had been born. Catharin had yet to find time to talk to Joel. She wanted to ask him, You told me you wanted him named John. But why Mark? That was my father’s name!
The baby boy was dwarfed by the pediatric unit, which had accommodations for ten to twelve babies, and badly outnumbered by doctors, nurses, and technicians. Evangelina—Miguel’s Leni—came to Catharin when she saw her enter.
“How is he?”
“A little bit small. A little bit weak,” said Leni. “But still a miracle.”
Looking through the glass bubble, Catharin saw a normal-looking newborn with ten fingers and ten toes and wrinkled brown skin. Too good to be true?
“Dr. Pei wants to keep him in the isolation bubble for a while to be sure there are no problems,” Leni said.
Catharin nodded. Immune function was exactly what Catharin would have scrutinized first, keeping the infant in the isolation bubble to protect him from germs in the meantime.
She had one more visit to make. The worst one.
He wasn’t very far away, just a corridor or two, but those two corridors seemed longer than the way across the stars. Her feet dragged in exhaustion and dread.
Joel stood outside Bix’s door with the green parrot perched on his shoulder, ruffled and unhappy. Joel said, “He’s in terrible shape, Cat.”
This was not a good time for this. Visiting Becca and seeing John Mark had taken a lot out of her. She remembered feeling this ragged when she had been a medical resident. But not this sad at the same time. She had never lost a patient who was also a dear friend. “I had a bad dream last night, and it made me realize that it’s too late for Joe or anybody else to help Bix, and I’ve got to tell him that.”
Joel’s reaction surprised her. With alacrity, he put his hand on the door to open it for her. “Thank you for coming.”
Bix was awake. She inwardly cringed at seeing him in person. He was hideously ill, reminding her of her failure to heal him in the first place, and let him go in the second place. She wanted to make him better with some last, desperate magic. Instead, she embraced him and wept.
The Captain’s private dining room echoed the era of sailing ships on the seas of Earth. It was furnished with a long table and seven comfortable chairs, and the Aeon emblem on the dark wall. The head chair stayed empty as Joel, Catharin, Lary, and Miguel took places around the table. “Don’t look at me,” said Joel. “He isn’t gone yet, and I’m not taking his chair.”
Over a casserole in which the vegetable was unidentifiable, Miguel asked Lary, “Can Joe Toronto be right about Green and Blue?”
Lary’s Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed with difficulty. “You mean his idea that whoever remodeled Blue also moved it back in—and that they evolved here in the first place? I’m starting to think he is.”
Joel’s attention jerked toward Lary. “Why? That world down there has nothing but plants and slugs, even if some of ‘em are giant live-bearing sea slugs.”
“Evidence is trickling in that Green’s ecosystem might be five or six billions of years old. Older than Earth itself. On Earth, the cockroaches and coelacanths were hundreds of millions of years old, some of the sulfur-metabolizing bacteria more like a billion. You see, Joel, in the long run, evolution has a bias toward the durable rather than the spectacular species.” With a wry smile, Lary added, “Oh, but it can be fun to be one of the less durable forms of life.”
His words twisted like a knife in Catharin’s heart. She knew he was hanging onto the health he had left by a thread.
“You’re not mad at us, are you?” asked Joel. He was more abrupt, more blunt these days than Catharin had ever known him to be before.
“Not at all. I came to the stars because I dreamed of another Earthlike world to study.” Lary included her in a wave of his hand. “And you’ve given me two. I don’t regret what’s come to pass, my friends.”
What Catharin had dreamed about on Earth seemed like a dry pressed flower now. Faded color, frozen form, it had found no way to take root in the alien soil of this changed future.
“But how could a body of such immensity—a whole world—be moved?” asked Miguel.
“Let Lary eat,” said Catharin.
Joel said, “You could do it if you built big enough mass drivers on both worlds. I do mean big. But there�
��s no sign of the machines—no sign of the race that did it—”
“Perhaps under the deep sands and seas of time,” said Miguel, “we would find some evidence of them.”
It was no wonder they wanted to talk about the hurricane moon. That distracted them from a dying Captain, and the other people who were hospitalized with stasis-caused illnesses, and the hospital bed waiting for Lary. And the hundred casualties of Seventeen Wedge T still in stasis.
Lary forced down another bite. “There’s a more obvious place to look for your evidence, namely, the double planet’s geometry. There’s an eclipse coming up—a total eclipse of the sun by Blue as seen from Green. It so happens that this event occurs almost precisely every six of Green and Blue’s years, due to their distance from each other and inclination of their mutual orbit with respect to the plane of the ecliptic.”
Joel looked at Lary narrowly. “You used to say that inclination was evidence that Blue was a stray world that fell in out of the void.”
“So I thought, but its inclination facilitates the peculiarly regular eclipse cycle. I calculated the effects of two hundred million years of tidal drag on both worlds, and when I did, the ‘almost’ I just mentioned came out exact. To the hour. I think the worlds were positioned for regular eclipses with timing of some ceremonial or religious significance.”
“Good Lord,” said Joel, putting a fork full of food back down on his plate. “You think Blue’s a sacred astronomical monument like Stonehenge?”
Radiating bizarre good cheer, Lary nodded. “And there’s Blue’s spin.” To Catharin’s dismay, Lary stopped eating, abandoning his knife and fork to gesture with his hands while explaining. “Blue’s spin has the effect of making hurricanes. Who knows what symbolic significance the hurricanes might have had?”
Miguel looked intently interested. “Kamikaze, divine wind for the Japanese,” he murmured. “Hurakan for Caribbean Indians.”
“On the other hand, maybe Blue spins to keep infidels out of the temple.”
“Say what?” Joel said.
“The hurricanes rather effectively prevent itinerant life-forms like ourselves from colonizing Blue. Perhaps those who moved it and reshaped it wanted it that way. I’m not sure about the religious or philosophical thinking that goes into keeping cathedrals holy, as there are no cathedrals on Mars.”
“There are in Mexico,” said Miguel, looking thoughtful. “With gates that can be locked.”
“I’d like to think that the auroras are a sacred sideshow,” Lary continued. “Auroral displays, such as the one last summer, are another result of Blue’s inclination.”
“I didn’t like the aurora. It seemed too weird for words,” said Catharin. “Will the eclipse be beautiful, like solar eclipses on Earth?”
Miguel said, “Those were not beautiful to peoples who thought a demon devoured the sun.”
“Surely any race capable of moving worlds would not be superstitious.”
“But they might be philosophical,” said Miguel.
“Remember how much bigger Blue is than Luna,” said Lary. “It’s going to be more spectacular than any eclipse you’ve ever seen.”
“I need to sit for a while.”
Miguel took one look at her face and proffered her his own desk chair here in the Life Support Ops office. Catharin sat down and put her face in her hands. In the silence of the interval between breezes from the air-conditioning vents, she heard Miguel’s slow breathing. Long minutes later, she said, “Bix is gone.”
“Ah. Better so.”
“Better still if I had given my permission earlier.” She shuddered as she remembered the changed expression on his ravaged face when she had talked to him two days ago, just after seeing John Mark for the first time. The expression had been one of relief.
“Permission?”
“He didn’t want to disappoint me, I think. I should have known it’s my job to let people die. I had a dream just before I came back up here. It was horrible. Everybody was dying and I didn’t have any medical science anymore.”
“A nightmare,” said Miguel.
“But the end of the dream wasn’t as bad as the rest. I told someone they were dying and that I’d help them get ready. And it had a very powerful feeling in the dream. It doesn’t feel so powerful in life.”
“The power is truth,” he said. “To say aloud what the dying man knows in his heart of hearts. Then to stop fighting for life, and let there be some peace.”
Miranda Blum had known as much. Think of it as rehearsing for death. It comes to us all sooner or later.
Catharin recalled something Miranda had said years before, in a lecture, when Catharin was a medical student. You must distinguish the battle from the battlefield.
Bix had been a battlefield for much too long, because the doctors up here would not give up on him, because he would not ask them to, because he did not want to disappoint her. Catharin felt tears coming on again. She had already cried enough on Joel’s shoulder. She pressed her thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of her eyes.
Miguel handed her a glass. So pure that it was tasteless, the water eased the lump in her throat. “For an astronaut,” she said, “I’m a slow learner.”
“The heart learns slower than the head.”
“Before Bix died, I asked him about burial. He said, ‘Some spacemen wanted burial at space. Not me. Too alone. Next time the Ship adjusts its orbit, just throw me in the engines and let me go out in a blaze of glory.’“
Bix had grinned at that turn of phrase, and the parched edges of his lips had cracked and oozed blood. “I think we should honor his wish. I came to ask you about it.”
“Of course. We can keep his body for a little while and then fulfill his last wish.”
“He’s truly not alone. The people who died in stasis—Wedge Seventeen, plus the isolated casualties—do you need them?”
“The biomass is relatively little. No. It is not needed for our closed life support system. Besides, I am not sure that people, myself included, are prepared to drink water and eat food knowing that our deceased comrades have been injected into the loop. Are you suggesting that we honor all of them that way?”
“Yes.” Fidgeting, she held up the glass in front of Miguel’s bank of plant specimens in climate-controlled containers. The water caught and reflected the monitor lights on the plant bank. “We tried an assortment of old rituals in Joel’s Starfall. That wasn’t enough. We need a new one, for here and now. Listen to what I have in mind and tell me if it will work.”
Joel woke Catharin up in the middle of the night, buzzing her on the Ship intercom. “I’m awake.” Barely, and by dint of fighting her way out of a deep blanket of exhaustion. “What’s wrong?”
“Toronto is right. John Mark is sick.” Joel’s voice was toneless and flat.
Catharin sagged back into the covers. “How?”
Joel struggled through an explanation, his words alternately faltering and spilling out. The tiny child had developed fever and respiratory distress with signs of a metabolic disorder. It might have been a single deranged gene that controlled a cellular process so basic that it was involved in healthy tissue in a hundred ways; or it might have been a set of malfunctioning genes in a subtle and unholy alliance. In other words, they did not even know what was wrong, much less how to fix it.
Catharin went to her office with its telcon and called Joe. “You were right about the baby,” she said bluntly.
His haggard appearance jolted her. So did his reply. “I’ll do everything I can.”
Not good enough. I want you to tell me you will perform a miracle. Aloud, she only said, “Thank you.”
Ever since his excursion into the cavern, Joe had been working too hard, in Wing’s opinion. Joe’s work was surely best approached as a long and arduous trek, not as a mad dash. He should at least take an occasional break. “Joe, come out to watch the eclipse begin with everyone else.”
“I’m not in a social mood.”
“The
n come with me into the woods to experience the eclipse in peace and quiet.”
Joe turned away from the telcon. His skin was strikingly pale, even for a Caucasian.
Rather than join the crowd at the promontory, they went the opposite way through the furry pines, Wing leading Joe to a wide rock outcrop that broke the forest. They gingerly sat on top of the rock heated by the sun of the long day. High in the noon sky, Blue confronted the glory of the sun. Sunlight falling through the interstices in the pine’s foliage dappled the ground. The dapples were imperfectly round: each had a small notch in the side. The eclipse had begun, Blue sliding between Green and the sun.
Already the air seemed somewhat dimmer. Wing had heard that eclipses on Earth caused a hush to fall on the land. Today the silence of Green seemed unnervingly appropriate, as though Green always waited for the darkness at noontime.
“Is this a good time for bad news?” Joe asked. He sounded bitterly serious.
Dismayed, Wing answered, “Eclipses were once thought to portend ill. What is it?”
“You know how scientists sometimes lose their edge after forty?”
As Joe’s words sank in, the silence of Green rang in Wing’s ears like a funeral toll. Wing struggled to keep his voice even. “As far as I know, that does not inevitably happen.”
“I think it did this time. Age or stasis. I’ve lost my touch, Carl. The inspiration won’t come. And we’re all in big trouble.” Joe’s breath sounded ragged and loud.
Wing, for his part, found it hard to breathe at all for the dread closing in on him. “Have you given up, then?”
“I’ll die trying before I give up.”
The breeze began to blow, a long soughing from the west—the air of Green rushing into the cool shadow of Blue. Wing knew eclipses on Earth had been accompanied by winds. But this was a bigger eclipse and a longer wind.
By unspoken consent, they started back to the base, at first walking slowly, then—unnerved by the wind’s constant whisper in the pines—almost running.
