by F P Adriani
Halloway spoke slowly now: “So, then the promise of immortality is true.”
“It seems that way.”
Halloway paused, his eyes staring at the silver medical cabinets against the wall behind Annabel. He finally frowned and said, “But I think we’ve missed something here: I didn’t make that we’ll-be-immortal deal with the planet; we’re supposed to be our normal selves now. Yet we’re still being physically affected.”
“Maybe it’s not total immortality,” Annabel said. “Maybe our aging has just slowed down a lot so will be unnoticeable till a longer period of time has passed. I basically don’t have enough data yet—it’s too soon. But, the planet is apparently incredibly powerful; it might exert a retarding effect on our biology, even if it doesn’t intend to.”
Halloway was looking directly into Annabel’s face now. “It seems like things have been changing here, haven’t they?”
It was Annabel’s turn to frown. “How do you mean?”
“I’ve seen you at Sasha’s settlement. And when I have, you’re usually talking with the same guy—that guy from Sasha’s ship, Raji.”
Annabel’s face colored now, to a bright pink. “Well, you know I lived in India for six years. It’s nice to speak the language again….”
“That’s not what I meant,” Halloway said on a small sigh. “It really is difficult to know how to proceed here, what the best way to proceed is.”
“Maybe in time it’ll come to you. I’ll support you either way, Captain,” Annabel said in a firm voice.
And Halloway nodded at her, his mouth a small, stiffly smiling curve.
*
After he left the medical bay, he went right upstairs to his cabin. It was late in the evening now; he had spent hours in his office doing paperwork earlier, and then hours more in Sasha’s settlement, with her….
She’d taken him to a concert; a few of the people singing and playing wooden instruments in it were supposedly from another settlement. Halloway wanted to talk to them, to ask them questions, but he didn’t get the chance to even go near them after the concert; as soon as he and Sasha stepped outside the concert auditorium, Sasha said she was hungry.
They went to a restaurant along the main road of her settlement, that same road he’d walked along with her on his first day here. Halloway ordered a fruit salad now; he’d never tasted fruits as deliciously juicy as the fruits on this planet, and whenever he would start eating them, it would always shock him—visibly apparently.
Sasha was sitting beside him at the small round restaurant table; she flashed him an amused smile, a smile he was pretty sure was from her and not from The Entity. He’d been seeing more aspects of her lately, and he usually enjoyed whatever aspects of her he saw.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her now, the smile on his face matching hers.
“Every time you eat, Robert, you look as if it’s your absolute first time eating.”
His slow laugh now was soft. “I do admit the food here on the planet is excellent—the best I’ve tasted. But I generally tend to go at life by wholes rather than halves.”
“That’s a good philosophy,” Sasha said, her eyes down on her plate now as she lifted a spoonful of fruit salad toward her mouth.
“Do you have a philosophy? I’ve never asked directly, and you’ve never said. Sometimes…I’m not sure what comes from you. I mean, I can tell when you’re speaking in your Entity-voice—”
Her head snapped up to his now, her salad not quite making it into her mouth, which was frowning a bit now. “My ‘Entity-voice’?”
“Yeah. That’s the way I like to think of it. You speak slower, as if you’re feeling sleepy. I know it’s not really you sometimes. You’ve said that before.”
“I’m still there though—it’s at least half-me,” she said fast now.
There was a pause between them, an uncomfortable pause, at least to Halloway it was uncomfortable. He watched her face closely for a long moment. “Sasha, you don’t look sure. And you keep frowning.”
“Well,” she said, frowning yet again, “I love it here; this is my life. It’s been a long one and will continue to be, as far as I know. But, it does occasionally seem like I don’t have enough control over my own destiny.”
It was Halloway’s turn to frown….
And he was frowning once again as he picked up his toothbrush in his cabin bathroom; Sasha had changed the subject after her comment about herself, but something about their conversation kept gnawing on the back of his mind, like an animal gnawing on a hard nut, trying to reach the substance inside.
He sighed as he began undressing in the darkness of his cabin. No matter his and his crew’s socializing with the people here, they still had a mapping and documenting job to do; in the GES that documenting was supposed to predominantly be about any physical phenomena he and his crew might find out in space. Still, organic life was also supposed to be recorded.
Some of Halloway’s crew, like Annabel, had clearly adjusted during their stay here; they had been able to do their work well under the strange circumstances on this planet. But, it seemed other crewmembers would never adjust. That bad argument from yesterday popped into Halloway’s head now.
Weeks ago Sasha had told him that, as long as his crew stayed within the atmosphere, it was fine with The Entity if they used the ship’s shuttles to travel on the planet. The option to use the shuttles had opened up more opportunities for Halloway’s crew to explore quite far away on the planet, so Halloway had made sure his crew used those opportunities.
During one of those excursions yesterday was when the argument between several of his crew happened. Halloway hadn’t witnessed it first-hand, but he didn’t like what he’d heard about the way Jeremy and two other crewmembers were arguing with each other and arguing about the planet, both about the overall situation here and about the mapping work they’d been doing.
Lately there had been several incidents showing too much anger and a lack of respect. Though the crew were still somewhat stuck in the situation here, it was becoming clear that The Entity was indeed powerful; it had sustained life here for eons, or possibly even longer. The Entity’s motives and behaviors might have a logic to The Entity that was inaccessible to humans, at least to those who weren’t linked up with The Entity—though even Sasha had repeatedly said that she didn’t know much….
Halloway had left her in her settlement hours ago, but, in the darkness of his cabin now, her face came to him, especially her crystal-like blue eyes. Those eyes came to him quite often when she wasn’t nearby. And he saw now that his difficulty in getting her eyes out of his head was yet another thing making it difficult for him to see what his final choice should be.
Kerry jumped into Halloway’s head now, replacing Sasha’s face. Halloway had buried Kerry and the others on the second day here. Sasha had told him earlier that day that his friends being buried wouldn’t make a difference to their being made alive again.
Halloway had thought about his dead friends every day since their death, and that issue troubled him for a number of reasons; until he could experience it with his own senses, he still did not quite believe that anything could be powerful enough to reanimate life.
And Halloway wondered if someday he and his crew would find themselves having stayed on the planet because of empty promises.
*
The next day started out as a very busy one for Halloway. Though Tyler’s position now was heading engineering, while they were on a planet inside a breathable atmosphere, the only daily major ship-work left for Tyler was keeping the reactor going, to supply electricity to power the lights and other simple basics on the ship, which, on this planet, weren’t even that important and didn’t even require that much energy to operate; quite a number of the crew had been spending time at Sasha’s settlement every day, which ultimately decreased the energy consumption on the Rover.
Because Tyler was only rarely needed in engineering now, he was free to do more exploring on the planet�
��s surface. Like Gene, Tyler was older than Halloway; Tyler had studied geology years ago, and almost daily for weeks now, he had gone exploring on the shuttles, so he could take an inventory of the planet’s rocks and minerals.
The morning after Halloway had talked with Annabel in her medical bay, Tyler asked Halloway to come out with him on the shuttle. “I’ve found something really intriguing,” Tyler said then.
Halloway quickly agreed to go exploring; then he told Meredith and Pat, one of Tyler’s engineering technicians, to come with him and Tyler.
When the four of them walked into the shuttle bay, Halloway asked Meredith to fly the shuttle, partly to give Jeremy a break; however, as soon as Halloway said that to Meredith, he saw bright anger flash through Jeremy’s dark eyes.
Halloway’s own dark eyes narrowed. “Is something going on? You got some problem here?”
Halloway knew that Jeremy could be difficult, that he tended toward he’s-an-asshole. But Halloway did not have the luxury of picking all of his crew; he had inherited Jeremy with the Rover. Jeremy was a very good mechanic, and in the end, the competence of Halloway’s crewmembers was more important to him than their individual dispositions. People’s attitudes could maybe be changed via rewards and punishments, but there were no rewards or punishments big enough to turn an incompetent into a competent.
Halloway glared at Jeremy now, still waiting for a response to his questions, but Halloway felt a rush of relief when Jeremy finally backed down. There was a small smile on his face as he said, “No problems here, Captain. But here’s the thing, Merry,” his head turned toward Meredith, “I spent hours yesterday reprogramming the shields to more quickly compensate for the intense heat in some places here. Don’t change the settings—and don’t damage my ship, dammit.” He finished talking on a light laugh, but now his laugh and statement annoyed Halloway: the shuttle wasn’t Jeremy’s ship. It belonged to the Rover, to Halloway, yet not even to him; it really belonged to the GES.
In fact, Halloway and his crew were all quite lucky that they had complete autonomy in this layer; as per the GES’s rules, the crew didn’t even have to check back with the GES while in TIL, which was especially fortunate now when they still hadn’t been able to get any signals to pass through the planet’s atmosphere.
*
“I keep looking at the data I’ve accumulated on this—it’s just incredible,” Tyler said to Halloway.
They were standing on the top of a hill, looking down over another valley, only this one was far larger, deeper, and wetter than the valley where Sasha lived. This valley also didn’t contain any settlements, maybe because there was nowhere to put them. The bits of usable land Halloway could make out were surrounded by hot, river-like flows of rocks and crystals that sparkled wetly in the sunshine.
The many gaseous and liquid jets breaking the surface of both the rivers and the land made this “wetland” a particularly hostile area. For protection against the heat and ejections, Halloway and Tyler had donned space suits. And now, over their suit communicators, Tyler said to Halloway, “I’ve gone down the slope a number of times—carefully!—to get some samples to bring back to the Rover. According to all the sampling and scanning I’ve done, and based on the geology-history database on the Rover, this is one of the highest concentrations of metamorphic rocks that’s ever been found—and THE highest for metasomatism, which are rocks fundamentally chemically changed by fluids. And, considering the waves of heat coming off the ground and the swamp-like conditions, I’d call it a tumultuous stew of rock formation and recrystallization of many kinds around here—we’re literally watching rock and crystal formation in real time as we stand here!
“I’ve never seen anything like this to this degree. We could probably study it for years and still not have an explanation for most of it.” Tyler paused and a shadow seemed to pass over his face behind the clear glass of his helmet. His voice was lower when he spoke again. “I wish Kerry was here to see this.”
“Me too,” Halloway said, his eyes gazing into the distance.
A silence passed between Tyler and Halloway. Then Halloway said slowly, “I know you don’t have much of a workload now, especially with many of us spending so much time off-ship. But, how are you getting on lately with the work you do have?”
“I’m all right, Captain. But even here on the surface, coordinating engineering is harder than I thought it would be. I have a new respect for Kerry.”
“I’ve never met a better engineer. She was with the GES for eighteen years. She has a sister on Earth. I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.”
Tyler’s head whipped toward Halloway’s. “So then you’ve decided not to stay.”
Halloway’s eyes were on the “rock stew” in the valley before him. “I’m still not sure,” he finally said.
“Most of us don’t have family to go back to, or we wouldn’t be on ships for nearly the whole year every year.”
“I know,” Halloway said.
*
The four of them continued working at the rock-wetland for the rest of the daytime, carefully going up and down the slope where the temperatures weren’t too dangerously high; they surveyed, collected more samples, took repeated measurements. Halloway was unused to the rigors of doing so much fieldwork; at the end of the day, he found himself standing on the top of that same hill, yawning hugely inside his helmet.
Nearby, Tyler laughed a little, and a warm, humorous glint lit up Meredith’s gray eyes as she said, “Working on the bridge isn’t as tough as we thought, huh?”
Halloway shook his head—on a laugh of his own. “So did we at least make a lot of progress here?”
“Oh yeah,” Tyler said, excited sparks seeming to dart across his green eyes as his hands closed the top of a white sample container.
Halloway pressed him for more specific info about the day’s findings, but Tyler said he didn’t want to commit to anything until he had a lot more data.
“The consummate scientist,” Halloway said as he turned toward the shuttle.
By the time the four of them got back to the Rover, the scheduled dinner in the ship’s dining hall had come and gone. Halloway grabbed some leftovers and went into his cabin to shower away the geological grime of the day and eat his food.
As he sat as his small dining table, chewing his potatoes, he regretted not staying in the dining hall; especially after spending the whole day alongside others, he really didn’t want to eat alone now. But, it was too late, too late to go back downstairs and seek out company, or to go into the settlement to do the same….
Plus, it always seemed that he was the one making overtures there, and he wondered now if he’d been too eager and that had been a mistake, considering that the future was still up in the air—or, maybe more correctly, the future was still up in space.
*
First thing the next morning, Halloway was with Tyler again, but on the bridge this time, looking at the computer’s graphs of the data they’d accumulated yesterday in the valley.
They were discussing some numbers flashing on one of the panel-tables when Pat’s clipped voice suddenly came over the bridge’s intercom: “Captain—are you there?”
Halloway strode over to his brown chair and pushed the intercom button on his silver panel. “Yes,” he said firmly.
“I’m down in the hall outside the shuttle bay,” Pat said. “Three of us were supposed to go out again today with Jeremy, to an area north of the settlement. Carey and I showed up here at the bay then, but Jeremy would only talk to us over the intercom. Then he stopped responding. Now Carey’s got the plate of the door controls off, but he can’t get the door open. There are other people in there with Jeremy too.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Halloway said, his hard voice edged with worry.
“Captain, I think they’re planning on going somewhere! I should have told you something sooner, but I didn’t think anything of it then: yesterday when we came back from the wet valley, Maggie
mentioned something about missing storage rations from the dining-room supply closet. She just assumed someone got hungrier than normal, or we used more than she thought when we went exploring. But now I’m thinking that maybe Jeremy’s been hoarding them.”
“I’m on my way down,” Halloway said. He clicked off with Pat.
When he turned around, Tyler flashed him troubled green eyes. “Is it just me, Captain, or is something bad going on among the crew—especially with Jeremy?”
“No, it’s not just you noticing. I’ve noticed it too, and I should have fucking done something about it sooner,” Halloway said, before rushing out the doorway and into the hall.
*
He started out walking down the hall, but within only seconds, his thoughts pushed his legs faster, and soon he was sprinting down the stairs and across the hall outside the shuttle bay. When he reached the main shuttle-bay door, Pat and Carey were still there. Carey’s short fingers were pulling wires out of the black casing for the door’s controls.
“Any luck?” Halloway asked.
On a frown now, Carey quickly shook his blond-haired head “no.”
Halloway pressed the communicator button on his belt. “Jeremy, this is Halloway. What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m doing what I should have done weeks ago,” Jeremy’s voice spat over the communicator and into the hall.
“Captain,” Carey said, sweat sliding down the ruddy sides of his cheeks, “what he did here isn’t something you can do fast. I haven’t even figured out how he altered the circuitry here to make this happen. He planned it. He had help. And Barbara’s been missing from her station since a few hours ago.”
Halloway knew that Barbara and Jeremy had been involved in a relationship for months. “Jeremy,” Halloway said now, “if you don’t come out within the next thirty seconds, I’m going to have you thrown into the brig for weeks. I don’t think you understand the duties of a position in the GES.”
