Moon Flower (7 page)

A rising fanfare from the band made her turn her head from studying the curving geometric surfaces of metal and glass that formed the roof and upper parts of the building. Two stewards wearing the maroon jackets and tan pants of Metterlin’s personal staff were tactfully but efficiently moving the dancers away from the center of the wooden floor and clearing an avenue to the side, where a paved path led from the entrance forecourt. Approaching along it, surrounded by an entourage of officials from the college, local political figures, more maroon jackets, and a half-dozen two-fifty-pounders in tuxedos bulging at the chest and the shoulders, was Conrad Metterlin himself, with his wife, Vera, on his arm.

He was clearly relishing every moment. As the people on the dance floor fell back into an admiring circle and others converged or fluttered mothlike from around the lawn and the marquee, he strode grandly in a sky-blue suit that shone with a silky luster, trimmed at the lapels and pockets with what looked like sheared mink, beaming and acknowledging favorites with waves from side to side. Vera maintained a regal poise, moving proudly in an iridescent gown that reflected in gold and green, and seemed more drapery than dress, the effect enhanced by jewelry flashing in the sunlight from her fingers, arms, neck, and hair. Without missing a step, the couple swept to the center of the floor as the band changed tune, where they proceeded to move smoothly into a stylish routine that brought approving murmurs and applause. The steps and twirls looked very technical and precise, but Jerri didn’t know enough about that kind of thing to be able to fully appreciate or name them. She took another bite from her plate and continued to watch, fascinated, while the King displayed himself before his court.

“They’ve been rehearsing it for a week,” a voice murmured from behind her. She looked up as Ivor slid down into one of the vacant chairs. He had exchanged his white jacket — the household manager didn’t share the maroon of the rank-and-file attendants — for one of lightweight red satin that blended in. Even so, he was taking a risk; staff were not expected to be visible when off-duty, let alone talking with guests. But all attention was elsewhere, which was doubtless why he had chosen this moment to make an appearance. “Had a special dance coach coming in daily for the last month. You don’t wanna know what the hourly rate was.”

Ivor was medium in height, trim and athletically built, with black hair cropped very close to his head, and deep brown eyes that Jerri had long suspected concealed a greater shrewdness than he tended to let on. He missed nothing and made decisions instantly that almost invariably turned out to be right. Also, he was a perfectionist — as anybody would practically have to be to qualify for the job. Yet despite the diligence he displayed in catering to every whim and need, from seeing that a dish of Esther’s preferred brand of ice cream was always available from the kitchen to making sure that a plane from the Metterliln’s small private air force was fueled up at all times with a pilot on call, Jerri discerned an attitude beneath it that was not in accord with the image that he was obliged to maintain. She wasn’t sure if it stemmed from envy hiding somewhere deep down, suppressed resentment, or simply a reaction to incessantly having to advertise one’s subservience. But she sometimes detected hints of rebellion stirring, which was maybe what had evoked a response in herself. His revealing of just how planned and calculated an affair the spectacle taking place on the dance floor had been was an example.

She smiled in the easygoing way that came naturally, whatever the setting. “They give you a break? I don’t believe it. The next thing, you’ll be telling me they’re turning human.”

“Hey, why don’t
you
try giving me a break? I’ve been on the go since five a.m. I spotted you here a while back — but I can only manage a few minutes. So hi again. Glad you could make it. What do you think of life in the stratosphere?”

“Some theories have it that elaborate dancing evolved as a selection ritual. Proficiency and coordination are genetic markers for reproductive eligibility. It’s still there if you look. But most people have conditioned themselves not to see it.”

“Don’t you ever stop working?”

Jerri dropped her flippant tone. “I’m enjoying it. Thanks for taking the trouble, Ivor. I appreciate it.”

“No problem.” Ivor selected a cocktail stick with a black olive, cheese, and anchovy from a dish on the table and sampled it. “Did you come down from Pinecrest this morning?”

“Actually, I was down here in the Bay Area already. That was something I wanted to tell you. I took a day off school.”

“School?”

“Off-planet Preparatory Basics. At Interworld’s place in Redwood City. Do you remember that crazy application I told you I put in — for an anthropology slot?...”

Ivor stared at her for what must have been a couple of seconds at most. She could almost sense the bit-patterns streaming through neural registers. “You got it?”

She nodded. He seemed genuinely pleased for her, even though it obviously meant she would be leaving.

“How soon?” he inquired.

“Four days.”

“
Four days
? Jeez! When you make your mind up to do something, you don’t hang around.”

“It’s all happened so quickly. That was why I didn’t mention it before — my feet haven’t touched the ground. The runaround to get Nim approved was unbelievable.”

“Nim’s going too?”

“Well, of
course
!” Nimrod was Jerri’s dog. She flashed Ivor a reproachful look that said he ought to know better. “So I’m
really
glad that this came up when it did, because it gives me a chance to tell you face-to-face. The ship’s up there in Earth orbit already. It’s called the
Tacoma
. We’ll be shuttling up from Alum Rock....”

CHAPTER SIX

Dr. Ellis, the department head at Berkeley, confided to Shearer that it was probably as well Shearer would be departing. Since the adtenna project had failed to yield worthwhile results, funding was unlikely to be renewed when the present contract expired. He already had a termination agreement and various release documents ready to be signed. Probably, Shearer reflected cynically as he scrawled his name on the dotted lines, a convenient way of getting rid of a surplus body and cutting the departmental payroll without incurring severance obligations.

Shearer had expected that if anything came of the Cyrene application, he would have had a lot more time to prepare for it than this. When he asked about Rob and Merritt, Ellis replied that arrangements would be made to absorb them elsewhere in the university. That was something to be grateful for anyway, Shearer reflected. Consequently, he was able to feel comfortable in himself and to look to the future with curious but guarded optimism when he showed up the next morning to begin the briefing sessions that had been scheduled across the Bay in Redwood City.

Interworld Restructuring’s company literature referred to its holdings on the Bay waterfront unassumingly as “offices.” The reality was a massive square-built structure the size of a city block, with angled walls and a flat airpad-roof, rendered in glass and various hues of plastic and ceramics. With just about all of the peninsula north from San Jose being urbanized, the complex stood on reclaimed land that had been worth a billion before anything was built on it, and extended out over the water above a system of piers inside a floating security fence of linked buoys patrolled by armed guards in speedboats. The north-facing wall of the massif was windowless and carried a plot of the nearer regions of the galaxy, illuminated at night, showing the locations of the stars where an Interworlds presence had been established. A morphing banner above cycled through the words peace-prosperity-progress.

Shearer’s first morning was spent going through bureaucratic procedures that involved various insurances, waivers, and releases, tying up the contractual conditions between himself, Interworlds, and various other interests that had connections with the forthcoming mission, and setting out the limits of liabilities involving the Occidenan government. The afternoon saw a grilling security interview with an unnerving character called Callen, apparently destined to be going with the mission too, who asked some pointed questions about Evan Wade. After that there was a group overview of the Interworlds organization and its operations. The next day began with classroom sessions on general off-planet mission familiarization and essential emergency procedures. After that things grew more interesting. They got down to specifics and began learning something about Cyrene itself.

Ever since the possibility of joining Wade had first raised itself, Shearer had consulted the scientific journals and Interworld’s own published reports to discover more about the planet, but apart from general data, the information he’d managed to find was surprisingly sparse. Compared with the publicity and fanfares to attract new investors that accompanied news from other worlds, it seemed odd. It was also odd that despite the much-publicized “miracle breakthrough” of Heim-physics-based communications that enabled round-trip message exchanges with the new colonies to be measured in hours rather than years, he had not managed to contact Wade for almost a month now, even though the regular net was supposed to access the interstellar system.

After Wade’s arrival there six months previously with the manned mission sent following Cyrene’s discovery, he had found some moments in what was clearly a busy life to send back a few initial impressions of the new world. In fact, in response to requests from Wade, Shearer had even arranged for some items of equipment that Wade said he needed to be sent with a later robot supply freighter. To Shearer’s mild surprise these had included a prototype A-wave adtenna, along with ancillary circuitry and spare parts, which seemed to indicate that Wade intended carrying on with his research pursuits there. However, Shearer’s subsequent messages expressing curiosity had produced no reply. When he used the opportunity of being inside Interworld to inquire further about this, he encountered what felt like evasiveness. But with all the new course material to absorb, he was too busy to ponder upon the matter unduly or pursue it further. He would be there soon enough, he told himself.

Cyrene was one of three widely spaced planets orbiting the star Ra Alpha, which formed a loose binary system with a smaller, redder, companion star called Ra Beta. A peculiarity about Cyrene was its orbit. Accompanied by its single moon, Calypso, it moved in a highly elliptical path about Ra Alpha, in the same plane as Ra Alpha and Ra Beta orbited each other — or more precisely, the center of mass between them, which because of Ra Beta’s lesser mass lay slightly displaced from the mid-point in the direction of Ra Alpha. Cyrene turned on its axis in a little under 28 terrestrial hours, and took 680 of these days to complete one orbit about its primary. The path it traced was such as to carry it almost three times as far from Ra Alpha at apogee — the farthest extremity of the ellipse — than its closest approach at perigee. The result, compounded by ten-degree tilt of its axis, was an extreme of variation between summer and winter conditions that life on Cyrene had adapted to in some remarkable ways.

One of the consequences of an inverse square law of gravity is that bodies in an elliptical orbit travel faster as they plunge inward to approach perigee, and slow down again as they move back out to apogee. This meant that Cyrene did not cover equal distances along its orbital path in equal times. Just 54 days, or 8 percent of the 680-day total orbital period, occurred within the quarter of the ellipse closest to perigee; 150 days, or 22 percent were inside that half of the ellipse; and the remaining 530 days were spent in the half remote from the parent star, the greater proportion of them far out around the apogee point. Winters on Cyrene, therefore, were long — drawn — out affairs, and the summers short, fiery, and with the daily conditions changing rapidly.

Point on% Distance% time Days

Semi-Orbit A to F A to F From A

A 0 0 0

B 25 8 28

C 50 22 75

D 75 50 170

E 87.5 69 235

F 100 100 340

Figure1. Orbit of Cyrene about Ra Alpha.

Total period =680 days. 1day =28 Earth hours.

It didn’t stop there. Ra Alpha also orbited Ra Beta (or at least, could be thought of in that way) with a period of 6,118 days, close to nine of Cyrene’s lopsided years. Since the ellipse that Cyrene traced around Ra Alpha preserved an effectively fixed direction in space (theory required a slow precession measured in thousands of years, but enough time had not accumulated yet for observational confirmation), the relative movement of Ra Beta superposed a longer 9-year cycle upon the basic 680-day summer-winter pattern, the intensity of which varied depending on where Cyrene was in its orbit about Ra Alpha when the three bodies came into alignment.

According to terms borrowed from Yocalan, the Cyrenean language that had been studied the most, the “Interior Point” occurred when Cyrene was directly between the two stars, and the “Exterior Point” when it again lay on the line connecting them, but on the far side of Ra Alpha. Because of the difference in periods, the place along Cyrene’s ellipse where these Points occurred progressed from one orbit to the next as Ra Alpha advanced in its slower path around Ra Beta.