Moon Flower

by James P. Hogan

  Korsofal and his family lived on what sounded like some kind of farm to the west, south of the city. Whether he owned it or managed it on behalf of other interests was unclear. Jerri and Marc had a standing invitation to come and see the place anytime they chose. All they could make of the story behind the letter was that it had found its way to Korsofal via someone who was in touch with Wade. Jerri was still suffering from a sense of unreality about conversing with alien beings of a world orbiting another star. Maybe the strangeness of it all had something to do with her not having slept soundly.

  She rolled up onto an elbow and looked around. On his pad of foam rubber on the floor, Nim stirred, opened an eye, and yawned. Zoe was still fast asleep in the cot opposite. Jerri wondered if whoever allocated the rooms had put her in with Zoe because Zoe was a dog person too. If so, it was nice to know that something was working.

  The flowers that she had put in water in a jug on top of the locker had changed color again. They had caught her eye when she and Marc were on their way back into the base enclosure, and she had stopped to pick some. They were like small orchids, delicately formed, with lilac petals hinting of white at the tips and turning to a pink blush at the base. They also had a dark, puffy collar encircling the stem immediately below the base of the petals, unlike anything Jerri had seen before. After putting them in her room, she had spent the rest of the day and early evening taking care of administrative chores and attending a social function staged after dinner. On returning to the room she found that the flowers had undergone a peculiar change. The lilac petals had curled inward and closed into buds, while the collars below had unfolded to reveal themselves as second sets of larger and finer petals of dark purple, effectively transforming into different flowers. Now, with morning, they had returned to their original form. Jerri leaned over to inhale the scent. It was delicate and subtle, like the textures and the colors, pervading and freshening the room.

  Marc believed that the authorities were anxious to catch up with Wade too for some reason, and had formed the theory that his own clearance for the Tacoma had been rushed through in order to set him up as a lead. It was likely, then, that his movements were being watched. That was what was troubling her, Jerri realized suddenly. She had an inexplicable premonition that he shouldn’t be seen approaching this Dr. Uberg, that Wade’s letter had named. It would reveal Uberg as knowing things that the wrong people would want to find out. Jerri could maybe talk to Uberg instead — inconspicuously, without attracting attention. And suddenly, now that the source of her apprehensions had crystallized, she felt more at ease.

  She got up, ran some fresh water for Nim, showered, and dressed. Then she clipped Nim’s leash on and let herself out of the room quietly so as not to disturb Zoe. Once outside the hut, she used her phone to call Marc.

  “Hey,” she greeted.

  “Hey.”

  “Where are you? I need to talk.”

  “I was just about to call you and say the same thing. I had breakfast early. I’m at the Rec Center. There’s an open patio area outside, back of the cafeteria. Why don’t I meet you there? We can sit in the sunshine. Remember that round yellow thing? Or here, I guess it’s things.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” Jerri said.

  Jeff Lang, real name Michael Frazer, code name for the Tacoma mission, Dolphin, was originally from Minneapolis as his cover story maintained. He had joined the military at an early age, after discovering at high school that an ROTC uniform drew available teenage females like bugs to a UV zapper, and gone on to complete several tours in the Middle East as a rookie Marine, and later as a not-so-rookie Special Operations infiltrator in southern Asia. When the whole sordid act finally fell apart, he expressed his cynicism and disillusionment by moving between the independent militias and freebooter bands that emerged in the Midwest and mountain states during the period of anarchy before the political situation stabilized. When Occidena finally consolidated, his talents quickly earned him a natural place and a more secure living on the less visible and unpublicized side of the services provided by Milicorp.

  Shearer hadn’t gone to any great length in unpacking his belongings, which could mean that he was planning on making a move sometime soon. There had been no communication with him from Wade during the voyage — something Shearer had mentioned repeatedly. That seemed to indicate that information on how to find Wade would have to come either from outside the base, or from somebody within it. The log and taps on Shearer’s phone showed no undue contact with anyone from the previous missions that it would have seemed odd for Shearer to have known. Lang had searched their room for the letter that Shearer had been given by the Cyrenean only hours after landing, but either Shearer had destroyed it or he was keeping it on his person. Lang could only go so far in shadowing Shearer’s movements without making his continual presence grounds for suspicion. He was already aware of being an irritation.

  He sat at a corner table inside the cafeteria, a news sheet spread in front of him, apparently playing idly with the buttons on his phone while he stared at its miniature screen. The phone held access codes to the security system, and he was able to keep an eye on Shearer via the cameras located around the base. Shearer was outside on the patio area, feeding tidbits to Jerri Perlok’s dog and apparently teaching it to shake paws. She herself had left some time before, after evidently meeting Shearer so he could take over dog minding for a while and give her a break. At one point in his training Lang had been taught how to deal with attack dogs, and they still produced a negative reaction in him.

  Callen’s hope was that Shearer would make his move sooner rather than later. He had two conflicting considerations to deal with. On the one hand, the slackness and population shrinkage at Revo base were intolerable, and restrictions on movement needed to be imposed until more could be learned. The pretext would be that the missing people had gone down with a hitherto unrecognized alien infection that Terrans were susceptible to, and the base was being quarantined pending investigation. On the other hand, tracking down Wade was a high-priority item for reasons that were none of Lang’s business, and shutting the base would mean penning Shearer in along with everyone else. And that would negate the whole purpose of bringing him here.

  Callen had compromised by postponing the announcement on closing the base for a couple of days to give Shearer time to act on whatever was being prepared. Provided Shearer took advantage of his opportunity soon, that seemed fairly safe. The arrivals fresh in from Earth would be busy enough for a while before whatever had affected their predecessors started putting them in a mind to begin a new exodus of their own. In the meantime, there was little else to do but watch and wait.

  A point of concern was that things didn’t seem to be playing out as intended, however. In Lang’s experience, if the letter had indeed given Shearer directions on how to proceed next, a person in Shearer’s situation should be doing something visible to follow up. But Shearer wasn’t showing much sign of it.

  The Personnel Directory for the base listed Dr. Dominic Uberg as a botanist. Jerri found him in one of the prefabricated laboratory huts behind the Recreation Center, taking notes and photographs among a collection of plants and seedlings growing in lines of labeled boxes filling a glass-walled extension on one side. The place had a general air of being underutilized, with cartons, cans, bottles, and containers stacked in offices and workspaces where there should have been people, and piles of unsorted papers littering half-empty shelves. A girl was working at a microscope in a side room when Jerri entered, but apart from Uberg himself, there was no other sign of life. He was in his early forties, perhaps, fair-skinned with crinkly yellow hair and metal-rimmed glasses, wearing a white work coat, and greeted her cordially. When she said she had come on some possibly rather sensitive business, he rinsed his hands in a metal sink and led her back through the hut to a cluttered room with a desk, computer station, shelves of soil sample jars, and botanical wall charts, that was evidently his office.

  “
So,” he said when she had explained the reason for her visit. “You are just down from the Tacoma, and I’ve never seen you before. You are representing this person Marc Shearer, who doesn’t come here to speak for himself, and you think I might know how to find Evan Wade.” His voice remained pleasant, but the eyes behind the lenses were amused and mildly mocking, as if he were hearing a good joke. He might almost have asked if she was selling any good bridges today too.

  Jerri reached inside her jacket, pulled out a folded tissue, and opened it to reveal the pressed rose that had been inside the letter. Uberg’s expression changed when he saw it. “I understand that this should mean something to you, Doctor,” she said.

  He took it from her and examined it. “Rosa spinosissima,” he murmured. “A variety of the Scotch rose. Rich and robust. It seems to have taken extraordinarily well. And in so short a time. Remarkable.”

  “You talk as if it’s from Earth,” Jerri said.

  “Yes indeed,” Uberg agreed. “Originally native to Europe, but since naturalized in North America.”

  Jerri wasn’t following. “How could it be? We — that is, Marc and I — were only given it yesterday. From a Cyrenean.”

  Uberg got up from the desk and went around to make sure the door was firmly closed. “You see,” he said as he came back and sat down again, “the seed it was grown from could only have come from one place: here. I myself gave some to Evan Wade before he left.” He spread his hands on the desk and regarded her with a new candor. “Very well, Ms. Perlok. I believe you.”

  Jerri slumped back in her chair. At last she felt that she was talking to someone who knew something and would give straight answers. “Doctor Uberg, what’s going on here?” she asked. All the pent-up strain and uncertainty of hearing nothing but evasion for months came out in the sudden weariness of her voice. “Wade sent a note — we burned it. It talked about incredible things happening here. What did he mean?”

  “There, I think you might be even a little ahead of me,” Uberg replied. “All I can tell you is that Cyrene does strange things to people. They start seeing themselves differently — reexamining values that they’ve never questioned, and thinking again about how they want to spend the rest of their lives.” He shrugged and spread his hands. “It seems that many of them take the notion into their heads to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

  Jerri shook her head disbelievingly. “You mean they just walk out? From an operational base? Nobody stops them? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Cyrene does strange things to everybody,” Uberg said. “Dreams that influence them deeply. Some claim uncanny premonitions. They start behaving in ways they wouldn’t normally.”

  Jerri recalled the peculiar compulsion she had felt that morning to come here herself instead of Marc, and then dismissed it as a coincidence. There were no grounds to go jumping to conclusions and for her to start acting out of character already. “Does anyone have any idea what might be causing it?” she asked.

  “There are some very peculiar botanical life-forms here,” Uberg said. “Unlike anything from anywhere else that I’ve ever heard of — we’re sending quantities back to Earth for study.”

  “On the freighter that’s being loaded in orbit,” Jerri asked.

  “We sent an earlier one a few weeks ago. I had a hand in organizing it — a lot of seed and plant specimens.” Uberg smiled briefly.

  “Are they connected with whatever’s going on?”

  “An early thought was that it could be something chemical, but the lab analyses haven’t turned up anything. I know that Wade is very interested in some of the varieties he’s found here too. And he’s a physicist. What the connection with physics is that intrigues him so much, I can’t tell you. One of the secrets that I learned long ago for living a peaceful life in this utopian existence that we have created in our wisdom is not to ask questions about things I don’t need to know.”

  It seemed about as much as Jerri was going to find out for now. “So, then, getting back to Wade...” she prompted.

  Uberg gave her a teasing half-smile. “Are you sure that Shearer really wants to go tramping off already? I’m only a botanist, but I seem to have been drafted as something of a de-facto scientist-general for the base. I could use a physicist here.”

  Jerri shook her head. “Sorry, but... we’re sure. Marc had his mind made up before we left Earth. He’s dedicated to the work that he and Wade were involved with.”

  “Ah, well, one has to ask.... What’s your field, out of curiosity?”

  “Anthropology.”

  “Oh. Are you the one who was to work with Martha Lemwitz?”

  “That’s right.”

  Uberg nodded and stared thoughtfully at Jerri for a few seconds longer as if sizing her up. Then his manner became more serious. “Tonight, the Cyreneans are hosting a welcoming banquet for the leaders of the newly arrived Terran mission, that I shall be attending,” he said. “It’s to be held at the residence of this part of the world’s head-of-state, on the other side of the lake.”

  “You mean Vattorix, the Yocalan king?”

  “That’s what it’s translated as — but I don’t think it quite means everything we understand by the term. I’ve been asked to nominate and bring a small group of scientific and commercial people to go along too. I gather the idea is to use the opportunity to suitably dazzle some of the influential Cyreneans who will be attending.” Uberg’s mouth twitched upward at the corners. “After all, we mustn’t forget that the prime purpose of the mission is to assist their development, must we? The investors back home must be getting impatient.” He paused. “I will arrange two places for yourself and Shearer. I can say that I needed a physicist, and this seemed a good way to get him involved and up to speed as quickly as possible.”

  “And what then?” Jerri asked.

  “By the time you get there, appropriate arrangements will have been made, and you’ll be advised accordingly,” Uberg told her. “Do you have any bio monitors or other trackable implants?”

  Jerri was struggling to absorb that this was really happening. She swallowed and shook her head. “No.”

  “And Shearer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Make sure. Anything of that nature must be neutralized. Also, leave behind all phones, compads, locator tags, anything with com chips or active radiative electronics. Bring only personal items that can be carried inconspicuously in a small carrying bag. New clothes will be provided — you won’t want ones advertising that you’re Terrans anyway.”

  “I also have a dog,” Jerri said. Uberg registered surprise and interrogated her silently for a moment. She held his eye unwaveringly, trying to muster an expression saying it would have to be all or nothing.

  “A rarity,” he commented. “In fact, I’m pretty sure we haven’t had one here before. The Cyreneans would be fascinated. I can include that as an added attraction. That will give an excuse for bringing you along as well. I’m glad you mentioned it. Very well....” He showed his hands to indicate that he was through. “You’ll receive details on where to be and when, later today.”

  Jerri waited for a second or so and started to get up. It seemed an empty note to be leaving on. “I just want to say thanks,” she told him. Uberg just nodded, already attending to papers that were on the desk. She started for the door, then stopped and turned. “Why?” she asked. “If you feel the way you do, how come you’re still here?”

  Uberg looked up. “There was something I had to remain behind to do,” he replied.

  Jerri waited. When nothing more was forthcoming she asked, “What?”

  “I wasn’t sure. But I think this might have been it.” Jerri stared back at him uncomprehendingly. “I told you, Cyrene does strange things to people,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gloria Bufort studied herself critically in the full-length mirror in the dressing room of one of the chalets fenced off from the regular accommodation blocks. No, she decided. The blue two-pi
ece with the blouse and silk neckerchief was too businesslike for an interplanetary ambassadress. A banquet called for something more grandiloquent — especially in a setting that in terms of style and customs brought to mind ballrooms from Gone with the Wind more than the twenty-first-century stellar frontier.

  “Betty!” she called petulantly over her shoulder. Her housemaid, who had accompanied her through the voyage, appeared in the doorway opening from the bedroom. “It’s no good. This makes me look like a flight attendant. What else is out there?” Betty had been unpacking and putting away the things that had come in the first baggage delivery, which had arrived from the shuttle pad area the evening before.

  “Pretty much just some practical things for the first few days, as I said, ma’am. I guess nobody expected anything elaborate so soon.”

  Gloria gave an exasperated sigh and began peeling off the blue two-piece. “You’d have thought this Vattorix and his people would have given us more time to settle in before staging something like this,” she grumbled. Okay, so Myles had told the Cyreneans that he wanted to meet with them as early as possible to stress the urgency of the defection problem. But if they’d had any consideration they could have made just a person-to-person thing involving him and whoever else needed to be there, and left the formal business until later. How could she be expected to look her best when everything she needed was still up in the ship? “Lay me out something casual for now,” she instructed. “Stretch pants and a windbreaker will do. I just want to go out for about half an hour.” Betty nodded and withdrew.