Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (46 page)

But now he notices an oddity: Yellaston, who has absolutely no nervous mannerisms, is massaging the knuckles of one hand. Is it indecision over Lory’s answers? Or is it the spark that’s sizzling behind the two scout commanders’ eyes—the planet?

The planet . . .

A golden jackpot rushes uncontrollably up through some pipe in Aaron’s midbrain. Is it really there at last? After all the grueling years, after Don and then Tim came back reporting nothing but gas and rocks around the first two Centaurus suns—is it possible our last chance has won? If Lory is to be believed, Kuh’s people are at this moment walking in Earth’s new Eden that we need so desperately. While we hang here in darkness, two long years away. If Lory is to be believed—

Aaron realizes Captain Yellaston is speaking to him.

“—You judge her to be medically fit, Dr. Kaye?”

“Yes, Sir. We’ve run the full program of tests designed for possible alien contact, plus the standard biomonitor spectrum. As of last night—I haven’t checked the last six hours—and apart from weight loss and the ulcerative lesions in the duodenum which she suffered from when she got back to
Centaur
, Dr. Lory Kaye shows no significant change from her baseline norms when she departed two years ago.”

“Those ulcers, Doctor; am I correct that you feel they can be fully accounted for by the strain of her solitary voyage back to this ship?”

“Yes, sir, I certainly do.” Aaron has no reservations here. Almost a year alone, navigating for a moving point in space? My god, how did you do it, he thinks again. My little sister. She isn’t human. And that alien thing on board, right behind her . . . For an instant Aaron can feel its location, down below the left wall. He glances at the recorder, suppressing the impulse to ask the others if they feel it too.

“Tomorrow is the final day of the twenty-one-day quarantine period,” Yellaston is saying. “An arbitrary interval, to be sure. You will continue the medical watch on Dr. Lory Kaye until the final debriefing session at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow.” Aaron nods. “If there are still no adverse indications, the quarantine will terminate at noon. As soon as feasible thereafter we should proceed to examine the specimen now sealed in scout ship Gamma. Say, the following day; will this give you sufficient time to coordinate your resources with the Xenobiology staff and be prepared to assist us, Dr. Kaye?”

“Yes, sir.”

Yellaston voice-signs the log entry, clicks the recorder off.

“Are you going to wait to signal home until after we look at that specimen?” Don asks him.

“Certainly.”

They go out then, four men moving carefully in cramped quarters. Roomier than they’d have on Earth now. Aaron sees Foy manage to get in Yellaston’s way, feels a twinge of sympathy for the authority-cathected wretch. Anything to get Daddy’s attention. He too has been moved by Yellaston’s good-wise-father projection. Are his own responses more mature? The hell with it, he decides; after ten years self-analysis becomes ritual.

When he emerges into Isolation corridor, Lory has vanished into her cubicle and Solange is nowhere in sight. He nods at Coby through the vitrex and punches the food-dispenser chute. His server arrives on a puff of kitchen-scented air. Protein loaf, with an unexpected garnish; the commissary staff seems to be in good form.

He munches, absently eyeing the three-di shot of Earth mounted above his desk in the office beyond the wall. That photo hangs all over the ship, a beautifully clear image from the early clean-air days. What are they eating there now, each other? But the thought has lost its impact after a decade away; like everyone else on
Centaur
, Aaron has no close ties left behind. Twenty billion humans swarming on that globe when they went; doubtless thirty by now, even with the famines. Waiting to explode to the stars now that the technology is—precariously—here. Waiting for the green light from
Centaur.
Not literally green, of course, Aaron thinks; just one of the three simple codes they can send at this range. For ten long years they have been sending yellow—
Exploration continues
. And until twenty days ago they were facing the bleak red—
No planet found, returning to base
. But now, Lory’s planet!

Aaron shakes his head, nibbling a slice of real egg, thinking of the green signal starting on its four-year trajectory back to Earth.
Planet found, launch emigration fleets, coordinates such-and-such.
Earth’s teeming billions all pressing for the handful of places in those improbable transport cans.

Aaron frowns at himself; he rejects the “teeming billions” concept. Doggedly he thinks of them as people, no matter how many—individual human beings each with a face, a name, a unique personality, and a meaningful fate. He invokes now his personal ritual, his defense against mass-think, which is simply the recalling of people he has known. An invisible army streams through his mind as he chews. People . . . from each he has learned. What? Something, large or small. An existence . . . the face of Thomas Brown glances coldly from memory; Brown was the sad murderer who was his first psychosurgery patient a zillion years ago at Houston Enclave. Had he helped Brown? Probably not, but Aaron will be damned if he will forget the man. The living man, not a statistic. His thoughts veer to the reality of his present shipmates, the sixty chosen souls. Cream of Earth, he thinks, only half in sarcasm. He is proud of them. Their endurance, their resourcefulness, their effortful sanity. He thinks it is not impossible that Earth’s sanest children are in this frail bubble of air and warmth twenty-six million million miles away.

He cycles his server, pulls himself together. He has eighteen hours of biomonitor tapes to check against the baseline medical norms of Tighe, Lory, and himself. And first he must talk to the two people who thought they saw Tighe. As he gets up, the image of Earth catches his eye again: their lonely, vulnerable jewel, hanging there in blackness. Suddenly last night’s dream jumps back, he sees again the monster penis groping toward the stars with
Centaur
at its tip. Pulsing with pressure, barely able to wait for the trigger that will release the human deluge—

He swats his forehead; the hallucination snaps out. Angry with himself, he plods back to the Observation cubby.

The image of Bruce Jang is waiting on the screen; his compatriot, the young Chinese-American engineer on a ship where everyone is a token something. Only not “young” anymore, Aaron admonishes himself.

“They have me in the coop, Bruce. I’m told you saw Tighe. Where and when?”

Bruce considers. Two years ago Bruce had still looked like Supersquirrel, all fast reflexes, buckteeth, and mocking see-it-all eyes. Cal Tech’s answer to the universe.

“He came by my quarters about oh-seven-hundred. I was cleaning up, the door was open, I saw him looking in at me. Sort of, you know, fon-nee.” Bruce shrugs, a joyless parody of his old jive manner.

“Funny? You mean his expression? Or was there anything peculiar about him, I mean visually different?”

A complex pause.

“Now that you mention it, yes. His refraction index was a shade off.”

Aaron puzzles, finally gets it. “Do you mean Tighe appeared somewhat blurred or translucent?”

“Yeah. Both,” Bruce says tightly. “But it was him.”

“Bruce, Tighe never left Isolation. We’ve checked his tapes.”

Very complex pause; Aaron winces, remembering the shadow waiting to enshroud Bruce. The near-suicide had been horrible.

“I see,” Bruce says too casually. “Where do I turn myself in?”

“You don’t. Somebody else saw Tighe, too. I’m checking them out next.”

“Somebody else?” The fast brain snaps, the shadow is gone. “Once is accident, twice is coincidence.” Bruce grins, ghost of Supersquirrel. “Three times is enemy action.”

“Check around for me, will you, Bruce? I’m stuck here.” Aaron doesn’t believe in enemy action, but he believes in helping Bruce Jang.

“Right. Not exactly my game of course, but—right.”

He goes out. The Man Without a Country. Over the years Bruce had attached himself to the Chinese scout team and in particular to Mei-Lin, their ecologist. He had confidently expected to be one of the two nonnationals Commander Kuh would, by agreement, take on the planet-seeking mission. It had nearly been a mortal blow when Kuh, being more deeply Chinese, had chosen Lory and the Aussie mineralogist.

The second Tighe-seer is now coming on Aaron’s screen: Åhlstrom, their tall, blonde, more-or-less human computer chief. Before Aaron can greet her she says resentfully, “It is not right you should let him out.”

“Where did you see him, Chief Åhlstrom?”

“In my Number Five unit.”

“Did you speak to him? Did he touch anything?”

“Nah. He went. But he was there. He should not be.”

“Tell me, please, did he look different in any way?”

“Different, yah,” the tall woman says scornfully. “He has half no head.”

“I mean, outside of his injury,” says Aaron carefully, recalling that Åhlstrom’s humor had once struck him as hearty.

“Nah.”

“Chief Åhlstrom, Lieutenant Tighe was never out of this Isolation ward. We’ve verified his heart rate and respiration record. He was here the entire time.”

“You let him out.”

“No, we did not. He was here.”

“Nah.”

Aaron argues, expecting Åhlstrom’s customary punch line: “Okay, I am stubborn Swede. You show me.” Her stubbornness is a
Centaur
legend; during acceleration she had saved the mission by refusing to believe her own computers’ ranging data until the hull sensors were rechecked for crystallization. But now she suddenly stands up as if gazing into a cold wind and says bleakly, “I could wish to go home. I am tired of this machine.”

This is so unusual that Aaron can find nothing useful to say before she strides out. He worries briefly; if Åhlstrom needs help, he is going to have a job reaching that closed crag of a mind. But he is all the same relieved; both the people who “saw” Tighe seem to have been under some personal stress.

Hallucinating Tighe, he thinks; that’s logical. Tighe stands for disaster. Appropriate anxiety symbol, surprising more people haven’t cathected on him. Again he feels pride in
Centaur
’s people, so steady after ten years’ deprivation of Earth, ten years of cramped living with death lying a skin of metal away. And now something more, that spark of alien life, sealed in
China Flower
’s hold, tethered out there. Lory’s alien. It is now hanging, he feels, directly under the rear of his chair.

“Two more people waiting to see you, boss,” says Coby’s voice on the intercom. This also is mildly unusual,
Centaur
is a healthy ship. The Peruvian oceanographer comes in, shamefacedly confessing to insomnia. He is religiously opposed to drugs, but Aaron persuades him to try an alpha regulator. Next is Kawabata, the hydroponics chief. He is bothered by leg spasms. Aaron prescribes quinine, and Kawabata pauses to chat enthusiastically about the state of the embryo cultures he has been testing.

“Ninety percent viability after ten-year cryostasis,” he grins. “We are ready for that planet. By the way, Doctor, is Lieutenant Tighe recovering so well? I see you are allowing him freedom.”

Aaron is too startled to do more than mumble. The farm chief cuts him off with an encomium on chickens, an animal Aaron loathes, and departs.

Shaken, Aaron goes to look at Tighe. The sensor lights outside his door indicate all pickups functioning: pulse regular, EEG normal if a trifle flat. He watches the alpha-scope break into a weak REM, resume again. The printouts themselves are outside. Aaron opens the door.

Tighe is lying on his side, showing his poignant Nordic profile, deep in drugged sleep. He doesn’t look over twenty: rose-petal flush on the high cheekbones, a pale gold cowlick falling over his closed eyes. The prototype Beautiful Boy who lives forever with his white aviator’s silk blowing in the wind of morning. As Aaron watches, Tighe stirs, flings up an arm with the IV taped to it, and shows his whole face, the long blond lashes still on his cheek.

It is now visible that Tighe is a thirty-year-old boy with an obscene dent where his left parietal arch should be. Three years back, Tiger Tighe had been their first—and so far, only—serious casualty. A stupid accident; he had returned safely from a difficult EVA and nearly been beheaded by a loose oxy tank while unsuiting in the free-fall shaft.

As if sensing Aaron’s presence Tighe smiles heartbreakingly, his long lips still promising joy. The undamaged Tighe had been the focus of several homosexual friendships, a development provided for in
Centaur
’s program. Like so much else that has brought us through sane, Aaron reflects ruefully. He had never been one of Tighe’s lovers. Too conscious of his own graceless, utilitarian body. Safer for him, the impersonal receptivity of Solange. Which was undoubtedly also in the program, Aaron thinks. Everything but Lory.

Tighe’s mouth is working, trying to say something in his sleep.

“Hoo, huh.” The speech circuits hunt across the wastelands of his ruined lobe. “Huhhh . . . Huh-home.” His lashes lift, the sky-blue eyes find Aaron.

“It’s all right, Tiger,” Aaron lies, touches him comfortingly. Tighe makes saliva noises and fades back into sleep, his elegant gymnast’s body turning a slow arabesque in the low gee. Aaron checks the catheters and goes.

The closed door opposite is Lory’s. Aaron gives it a brotherly thump and looks in, conscious of the ceiling scanner. Lory is on the bunk reading. A nice, normal scene.

“Tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred,” he tells her. “The wrap-up. You okay?”

“You should know.” She grimaces cheerfully at the biomonitor pickups.

Aaron squints at her, unable to imagine how he can voice some cosmic, lifelong suspicion with that scanner overhead. He goes out to talk to Coby.

“Is there any conceivable chance that Tiger could have got to where an intercom screen could have picked him up?”

“Absolute negative. See for yourself,” Coby says, loading tape spools into the Isolation pass-through. His eyes flick up at Aaron. “I didn’t bugger them.”