Woman Who Loved the Moon (18 page)

* * *

They hovered over the planet at the edge of light.

Sunlight and heat poured across one face of the world; the other was left to starlight and cold. Bands of red light flickered around the room, glowing a red warning. Phillipa reached out a hand to brush them away. She barked her knuckles on the wall. She stared out, down, transfixed above a world cut in two, one side light, one dark, one hot, one frozen. The light shields closed. She fumbled to strap in.

The ship, a silver graceful sliver, sliced out of space, through an obscuring sky, and down into dark.

Phillipa walked to the control room. Xavier sat at his desk console, staring at numbers on his comp-screen. “This place is a freak,” he said.

Phillipa sat down in a chair. She touched the light switches for a moment, and tripped the light shields. They went up. Darkness crawled outside the window. A crowd of stars lit the planet with the force of a moon. The rocks reflected starlight. She touched the switch again. The shields went down; the lights came on in the cabin. “Has this place got a name?”

“No. Just a number. M427-something. Want to name it?”

“I’d like to go outside.”

Xavier scowled. It was the scowl of a punchinello puppet, ferocious and red on the dark narrow face. Phillipa said, “The reports say it has a breathable atmosphere and a gravity just under 1G. There’s no good reason why I can’t take a walk, Zave. If my antibac shots don’t hold up, I’ll sue.”

“If your antibac shots don’t hold up you’ll be dead,” Xavier said gloomily.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Xavier looked away from the hidden windows. “I don’t like freaks. This planet ought to be a Janus world, one light side, one dark side, and no rotation. It’s not. It has an atmosphere—an oxygen atmosphere, yet. It has plants. It’s weird.”

“Can we walk around without machinery?”

“I don’t want to walk around at all,” Xavier said. “I like things and places that are one thing or another, and I like knowing which they are.”

“We’re an X-Team, Zave,” Phillipa said. “That’s the thing we are.”

“Go out if you want to,” the captain said. “We’ll sit for a few days. Lui’s found a bug in the Drive that he wants to fix. Seth would like us to move to the day side. It has more vegetation.”

“What’s the day side look like?”

“Hot, marshy, slightly volcanic. Seth says it looks like a Cretaceous mangrove swamp. Hot. About 170 degrees Fahrenheit.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Phillipa said. “What’s that in Centigrade?”

Xavier scowled at the ceiling. “About 76 degrees.”

Phillipa had a sudden vision of the other side. Clouds, steam, black sooty smoke, coiling in the grip of hot winds, plumed across the dim red sky. In space a sky. On the other side of the thick clouds, in space, a huge red sun pulsed like a flapping flag. Tough twisted vines clung strongly to the stones. Lizards hid in the vines, purple and orange. As the world rotated slowly, inch by tired inch passing from day to night, shadows fell across the rocks. The vines contracted tensely. Storms lashed the twilit plains. The lizards crawled for shelter into the cracks and holes in the cooling earth. They blinked their eyelids as the light faded and the night brought out the stars their eyes would never see.

“I asked him if he wanted to wear an HT suit while he gathered his specimens. At least on the dark side he can walk out without back-packing a heating system.”

“How cold is it?”

“One degree below Centigrade zero, mean temperature.”

“Break out the parkas.”

“Think this planet has any people on it?” Xavier said.

Phillipa nodded once.
That
was what was worrying him. Not a place, but people who might be different or strange or even dangerous. Aliens. If they are here, I’ll find them, she thought. But no Exploration Team has yet found aliens. Why should we? Just alien places. “Who’d colonize the place? We won’t. The Verdians wouldn’t. They couldn’t live here either.”

“I wasn’t thinking of them.” Verdians were aliens but they were familiar, known. It was they who had found Terra, anyway, falling out of the sky a hundred years ago. “But there could be something here, living in caves—”

“To coexist with the polar bears? Who’ve you been reading, Walt Disney?”

“Who?” said Xavier blankly.

Phillipa grinned. “A twentieth century artist. Never mind. Look, anything smarter than we are would have gotten off this planet long ago.” Xavier was still scowling. She imitated him.

“You don’t
feel
anything?”

“When I’m locked up in the ship with the rest of you bums,” Phillipa said, “the only thing I can feel is you. To do my work I have to go outside.”

“So go! I said you could go. Maybe I’ll take a trek—stretch my legs a bit. Even if this place
is
creepy.”

Phillipa said, “Creepy? That’s not a very scientific term. You going to put that into your report, Zave? This place is creepy, folks.”

* * *

But creepy was a good word. This place makes me feel like there’s something creeping up on me.

She was sitting in a cul-de-sac of rock. Beyond the jagged brim above her head, the lights of the ship glimmered a false dawn. True dawn was long ago and far away. She had looked closely at the reports before leaving the ship. It took this planet nine standard years to go around the sun, and almost a thousand standard years to turn from dawn to dawn. A year was nine years long and a day was a millennium. Five hundred years of night.

It felt good to be away from the ship for a while. Phillipa relaxed and extended her mind. Nothing. Some animals, too dull to catch. This was their final stop; from here they were going home to Main Base on Nexus. One more long Jump through the Hype. She counted. They had stopped on four planets. Too many. Already the team was beginning to show signs of entropic disturbances. Xavier’s xenophobia was not normal. And the Drive crew, Lui especially, had lapsed into near-autism. Too many jumps between spacetime normal and hyperspace would do that, would joggle the brain. She could feel their limits stretching, the shape of their sanities changing. And she, Phillipa, the telepath of a team—who would feel it when she broke? Who would heal the tear?

She shook herself mentally. There it was again, that creeping depression. Have to stop that.

The cold was getting at her hands and she tucked them under her armpits, into the warmth of the parka. The cold slapped her cheeks with hands of windblown ice. She reached up and pulled the drawstrings tighter, pulling the fur hood round her face. She tried to imagine herself home on Terra, standing in a field, with the bright yellow lights of houses shining across snow. The picture came strangely into her mind. Memory distortion, said a remembered voice, is an early clinical sign of entropic disorientation. Andresson, at the Institute. She had said that.

Phillipa stamped around on the rock. Time to be getting back. The ship’s lights glared across the tundra as if it were facing an enemy. The ice-coated rocks glared back. Did animals truly live in this cold? This cold that never let up, that lasted a thousand years? She pictured little furry things, rats, owls with immense eyes, and scaly lizards that hid in the thickly matted vines. She tugged on a tendril of vine. It gave reluctantly. Water slicked her glove. The drops, tinged with orange, made her think of eyes.

She turned to leave the cul-de-sac.

Stopped.

There was a youth standing in the mouth of the cul-de-sac. White skin, white hair, white eyebrows—an albino, Phillipa thought. But, no, his eyes are black. Then she realized that those were the youth’s pupils, round, huge, like cats’ eyes, like an owl’s eyes. He was about 1.7 meters tall. He was naked. He was human.

Phillipa felt her heartbeat race. Eyes, ears, nose, fingers and toes, bare toes on the ground, it made no sense! Amazed, she looked into the other’s face.

A claw dug into her brain. She was a battered branch whipped by a tossing wind.

At Psi Center, where she had trained to work on an X-Team, the final examination had been a no-holds-barred attempt at telepathic takeover. It had not been gentle, it had left her shaking and sick, but whole. She had passed. This was like death.

She felt her body break, and fall.

She came out of the mind’s darkness into more darkness. Above her there were stars. She was lying on something soft. She turned to look; it was the vines. They smelt metallic. She shifted, braced her hands against them, trying to sit up. She only achieved a deep trembling. She lay still.

Black eyes in a white face bent over her. She flinched.

“I am sorry,” said a soft voice in her own language. “I did not mean to hurt you.”

“I’m just weak,” she said. She tried to sit up again. An arm came round her shoulders to help. Through the fabric and fur of her parka she felt it, like a cold bar against her flesh.

“You have been unconscious,” said the alien.

“How long?”

“Three standard hours.” All that is taken from my mind, Phillipa thought. She felt emptied. Check for the pattern. You are an X-Team telepath, that is your skill and your training and your job. All beings have patterns. Find out what kind of a being this is—touch its mind.

She could not. She was too weak.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“My name is Cold.”

A tutelary spirit? This isn’t real. I’m hallucinating. I must tell Zave. She closed her eyes, trying to will herself into the ship’s infirmary, with its deep-sided bunks and shaded lights.

But when she opened her eyes it was all still there, vines, ice, Cold. She forced her numb hand towards her face, and touched the stud of her communicator.

“Phil!” Xavier’s voice fell thudding into the small space. “Where the hell are you?”

“In a small dead-end canyon. I can see the lights of the ship.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m not sure. I fell and blacked out.” She looked at the alien. “Zave, listen. There are people on this planet. One, anyway. Humanoid, advanced, and not hostile. I’m serious.”

“Sure, but are you sane? Don’t switch off, you hear? We’ll find you.”

When Xavier and the others came, the alien had gone, and Phillipa had managed to stand up.

* * *

They put her in the Infirmary, and Mickey put her to sleep. When she woke, the ship’s time was morning. Xavier was sitting by the bed. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi. How you feeling?”

She stretched. She was weakened. Her mind felt bruised. “Tired.”

“Mickey says there’s nothing the matter with you that some rest won’t fix. Out in the cold too long. What the hell happened to you?”

“Maybe I fell over a rock.”

“Could be. And you had a dream about friendly humanoids?”

Phillipa said, “It wasn’t a dream, Zave. He was there.”

“Did you speak with him?”

“Yes.”

“In what language?”

“In my own.” She saw Zave’s face twist skeptically. “He took it from my mind, Zave. He was a telepath.”

“It sounds nuts,” Xavier said. “Lab is testing the vines now for hallucinogens. You fell on a bed of them. But I think the Hype is getting to you, Phil. Lui says he’s almost finished playing with the Drive. It’s time we all got home.”

Phillipa turned her face to the wall. Home. What was home? There was a crack in her mind, and the ice was coming through it. The cells in her brain had been pushed askew; she could almost feel them, like a break in a plate. “You don’t understand,” she said wearily. “He
was
there.”

* * *

She woke again. Ship’s time said late afternoon. Some measure of balance had returned to her. Maybe Xavier’s right, she thought. Of course he’s right! You noticed the early signs yourself, the depression, the memory distortion. Time for us all to be home. Back to Psi Center. But that thought brought back, with jolting force, the spongy sensation of vines beneath her back, a cold arm holding her, and a canopy of sky like a black blanket with stars poking through it like knives.

“Hey, Mickey.”

The medic turned around. “You awake again? How do you feel?”

“Better.” Phillipa sat up “Can I get out of here, or do I have to stay in bed?”

“You’re not confined,” Mickey said. She pushed the buttons that released the sides of the bed. “Just take it easy. Your clothes are in that panel. If you begin to feel disoriented, come back here and go to sleep some more.”

“All right.”

She went to the Drive Core to watch the engineers. At Psi Center they had trained for a while on a simulated ship. Phillipa knew enough to keep out of the way. The Verdians had discovered the principles of hyperdrive but had been unable to do more. Ilse Perse on Old Terra had created the Drive and seen the first starship Jump out into the Hype.

Warp space, hyperspace, the Hype—there were no stars in it, just clouds of congealing dust. Entropy was different within hyperspace. It was partially congruent to spacetime normal. The routes it provided through the galaxy could be mapped—were being mapped. Unmanned ships with sensors did the mappings, and peopled ships followed them, Jumping through the Hype to one and then another place within spacetime normal.