Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (47 page)

“Did I say that?” Aaron snaps. But he’s guilty, they both know it; because it was Coby who was Frank Foy’s other important case, five years back. Aaron had caught his fellow doctor making and dealing dream-drugs. Aaron sighs. A miserable business. There had been no question of “punishing” Coby, or anyone else on
Centaur
, for that matter; no one could be spared. And Coby is their top pathologist. If and when they get back to Earth he will face—who knows what? Meanwhile he has simply gone on with his job; it was then he had started calling Aaron “boss.”

Now Aaron sees a new animation flickering behind Coby’s clever-ape face. Of course—the planet. Never to go back. Good, Aaron thinks. He likes Coby, he relishes the unquenchable primate ingenuity of the man.

Coby is telling him that the Drive chief Gomulka has come in with a broken knuckle, refusing to see Aaron. Coby pauses, waiting for Aaron to get the implication. Aaron gets it, unhappily; a physical fight, the first in years.

“Who did he hit?”

“One of the Russkies, if I had to guess.”

Aaron nods wearily, pulling in the tapes he has to check. “Where’s Solange?”

“Over with Xenobiology, checking out what you’ll need to analyze that thing. Oh, by the way, boss”—Coby gestures at the service roster posted on their wall—“you missed your turn on the shit detail. Last night was Common Areas. I got Nan to swap you for a Kitchen shift next week, maybe you can talk Berryman into giving us some real coffee.”

Aaron grunts and takes the tapes back to Interview to start the comparator runs. It is a struggle to keep awake while the spools speed through the discrepancy analyzer, eliciting no reaction. His own and Lory’s are all nominal, nominal, nominal, nominal-all variation within normative limits. Aaron goes out to the food dispenser, hoping that Solange will show. She doesn’t. Reluctantly he returns to run Tighe’s.

Here, finally, the discrepancy indicator stirs. After two hours of input the analyzer has summed a deviation bordering on significance; it hovers there as Aaron continues the run. Aaron is not surprised; it’s the same set of deviations Tighe has shown all week, since his problematical contact with the alien. A slight, progressive flattening of vital function, most marked in the EEG. Always a little less theta. Assuming theta correlates with memory, Tighe is losing capacity to learn.

Aren’t we all, Aaron thinks, wondering again what actually happened in Gamma corridor. The scout ship
China Flower
had been berthed there with the ports sealed, attended by a single guard. Boring duty, after two weeks of nothing. The guard had been down by the stern end having a cup of brew. When he turned around, Tighe was lying on the deck up by the scout’s cargo hatch and the port was open. Tighe must have come out of the access ramp right by the port; he had been EVA team-leader before his accident, it was a natural place for him to wander to. Had he been opening or closing the lock when he collapsed? Had he gone inside and looked at the alien, had the thing given him some sort of shock? Nobody can know.

Aaron tells himself that in all likelihood Tighe had simply suffered a spontaneous cerebral seizure as he approached the lock. He hopes so. Whatever happened, Yellaston ordered the scout ship to be undocked and detached from
Centaur
on a tether. And Tighe’s level of vitality is on the downward trend, day after day. Unorthodox, unless there is unregistered midbrain deterioration. Aaron can think of nothing to do about it. Maybe better so.

Bone-weary now, he packs up and forces himself to go attend to Tighe’s necessities. Better say good-night to Lory, too.

She is still curled on her bunk like a kid, deep in a book.
Centaur
has real books in addition to the standard microfiches; an amenity.

“Finding some good stuff?”

She looks up, brightly, fondly. The scanner will show that wholesome sisterly grin.

“Listen to this, Arn.” She starts reading something convoluted; Aaron’s ears adjust only in time to catch the last of it.

“. . .
Grow upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die. . . .
It’s very old, Arn. Tennyson.” Her smile is private.

Aaron nods warily, acknowledging the earnest Victorian. He has had enough tiger and ape and he will not get drawn into another dialogue with Lory, not with that scanner going.

“Don’t stay up all night.”

“Oh, this rests me,” she tells him happily. “It’s an escape into truth. I used to read and read on the way back.”

Aaron flinches at the thought of that solitary trip. Dear Lory, little madwoman.

“Night.”

“Good night, dear Arn.”

He gets himself into his bunk, grumbling old curses at
Centaur
’s selection board. Pedestrian clots, no intuition. Lory the non-sex-object, sure. Barring the fact that Lory’s prepubescent body is capable of unhinging the occasional male with the notion that she contains some kind of latent sexual lightning, some secret supersensuality lurking like hot lava in the marrow of her narrow bones. In their years on Earth, Aaron had watched a series of such idiots breaking their balls in the attempt to penetrate to Lory’s mythical marrow. Luckily none on
Centaur
, so far.

But that wasn’t the main item the selection board missed. Aaron sighs, lying in the dark. He knows the secret lightning in Lory’s bones. Not sex, would that it were. Her implacable innocence—what was the old phrase,
a fanatic heart
. A too-clear vision of good, a too-sure hatred of evil. No love lost, in between. Not much use for living people. Aaron sighs again, hearing the frightening condemnation in her unguarded voice. Has she changed? Probably not. Probably doesn’t matter, he tells himself; how could it matter that chance has put Lory’s head between us and whatever’s on that planet? It’s all a technical problem, air and water and bugs and so on. . . .

Effortfully he pushes the thoughts away. I’ve been cooped up here twenty days with her and Tighe, he tells himself; I’m getting deprivation fantasies. As sleep claims him his last thought is of Captain Yellaston. The old man must be getting low on his supplies.

II

. . .
Immensely tall, eternally noble, the woman paces through gray streaming clouds. In rituals of grief she moves, her heavy hair bound with dark jewels; she gestures to her head, her heart, a mourning queen pacing beside a leaden sea. Chained beasts move slowly at her heels, the tiger stepping with sad majesty, the ape mimicking her despair. She plucks the bindings from her hair in agony, it streams on the icy wind. She bends to loose the tiger, urging it to freedom. But the beast form wavers and swells, thins out; the tiger floats to ghostly life among the stars. The ape is crouching at her feet; she lays her long fingers on its head. It has turned to stone. The woman begins a death chant, breaking her bracelets one by one beside the sea. . . .

Aaron is awake now, his eyes streaming with grief. He hears his own throat gasping,
Uh—uhh—uhh
, a sound he hasn’t made since—since his parents died, he remembers sharply. The pillow is soaked. What is it? What the hell is doing it? That was Lory’s goddamn ape and tiger, he thinks. Stop it! Quit.

He stumbles up, finds it’s the middle of the night, not morning. As he douses his face he is acutely aware of a direction underfoot, an invisible line leading down through the hull to the sealed-up scouter, to the alien inside. Lory’s alien in there.

All right. Face it.

He sits on his bunk in the dark. Do you believe in alien telepathic powers, Dr. Kaye? Is that vegetable in there broadcasting on a human wavelength, sending out despair?

Possible, I suppose, Doctor. Anything—almost anything—is
possible.

But the tissue samples, the photos. They showed no differentiated structure, no neural organization. No brain. It’s a sessile plant-thing. Like a cauliflower, like a big lichen; like a bunch of big grapes, she said. All it does is metabolize and put out a little bioluminescence. Discrete cellular potentials
cannot
generate anything complex enough to trigger human emotions. Or can they? No, he decides. We can’t do it ourselves, for god’s sake. And it’s not anything physical like subsonics, not with the vacuum between. And besides, if it is doing this, Lory couldn’t possibly have got back here sane. Nearly a year of living ten feet away from a thing sending out nightmares? Not even Lory. It has to be me. I’m projecting.

Okay; it’s me.

He lies down again, reminding himself that it’s time he ran another general checkup. He should expand the freeassociation session, too; other people may be getting stress phenomena. Those Tighe-sightings . . . Last time he caught two incipient depressions. And he’ll do all that part himself, people won’t take it from Coby, he thinks, and catches himself in the fatuity. The fact is that people talk a lot more to Coby than they do to him. Maybe I have some of Lory’s holy-holies. He grins, drifting off.

. . . Tighe drifts
in
through the walls, curled in a fôetal clasp, his genital sac enormous. But it’s a different Tighe. He’s green, for one thing, Aaron sees. And vastly puffy, like a huge cauliflower or a cumulus cloud. Not frightening. Not anything, really; Aaron watches neutrally as cumulus-cloud-green Tighe swells, thins out, floats to ghostly life among the stars. One bulbous baby hand waves slowly, Ta-ta. . . .

With a jolt Aaron discovers it really is morning. He lurches up, feeling vile. When he comes out, Solange is sitting at the desk beyond the vitrex; Aaron feels instantly better.

“Soli! Where the hell were you?”

“There are so many problems, Aaron.” She frowns, a severe flower. “When you come out you will see. I am giving you no more supplies.”

“Maybe I’m not coming out.” Aaron draws his hot cup.

“Oh?” The flower registers disbelief, dismay. “Captain Yellaston said three weeks, the period is over and you are perfectly healthy.”

“I don’t feel so healthy, Soli.”

“Don’t you want to come out, Aaron?” Her dark eyes twinkle, her bosom radiates the shapes of holding and being held, she warms him through the vitrex. Aaron tries to radiate back. They have been lovers for five years now, he loves her very much in his low-sex-drive way.

“You know I do, Soli.” He watches Coby come in with Aaron’s printouts. “How’m I doing, Bill? Any sign of alien plague?”

Solange’s face empathizes again: tender alarm. She’s like a play Aaron thinks. If a brontosaurus stubbed its toe, Soli would go
Oooh
in sympathy. Probably do the same at the Crucifixion, but he doesn’t hold that against her. Only so much bandwidth for anybody; Soli is set low.

“Don’t pick up a thing on visual, boss, except you’re not sleeping too good.”

“I know. Bad dreams. Too much excitement, buried bogies stirring up. When I get out, we’re going to run another general checkup.”

“When the doc gets symptoms he checks everybody else,” Coby says cheerfully, the leer almost unnoticeable. He’s happy, all right. “By the way, Tiger’s awake. He just took a pee.”

“Good. I’ll see if I can bring him out to eat.”

When Aaron goes in, he finds Tighe trying to sit up.

“Want to come out and eat, Tiger?” Aaron releases him from the tubes and electrodes, assists him outside to the dispenser. As Tighe sees Solange, his hand whips up in his old jaunty greeting. Eerie to see the well-practiced movements so swift and deft; for minutes the deficit is hidden. Quite normally he takes the server, begins to eat. But after a few mouthfuls a harsh noise erupts from his throat and the server falls, he stares at it tragically as Aaron retrieves it.

“Let me, Aaron, I have to come in.” Solange is getting into her decontamination suit.

She brings in the new batch of tapes. Aaron goes down the hall to run them. The Interview room is normally their data processing unit.
Centaur
’s builders really did a job, he muses while the spools spin nominal-nominal, as before. Adequate provision for quarantine, provision for every damn thing. Imagine it, a starship. I sit here in a ship among the stars.
Centaur
, the second one ever . . .
Pioneer
was the first, Aaron had been in third grade when
Pioneer
headed out for Barnard’s star. He was in high school when the signal came back red: Nothing.

What circles Barnard’s star, a rock? A gasball? He will never know, because
Pioneer
didn’t make it back to structured-signal range. Aaron was an intern when they declared her lost. Her regular identity code had quit, and there was a new faint radio source in her direction. What happened? No telling . . . She was a much smaller, slower ship.
Centaur
’s builders had redesigned on the basis of the reports from
Pioneer
while she was still in talking distance.

Aaron pulls his attention back to the tapes, automatically suppressing the thought of what will happen if
Centaur
too finds nothing after all. They have all trained themselves not to think about that, about the fact that Earth is in no shape to mount another mission if
Centaur
fails. Even if they could, where next? Nine light-years to Sirius? Hopeless. The energy and resources to build
Centaur
almost weren’t there ten years ago. Maybe by now they’ve cannibalized the emigration hulls, Aaron’s submind mutters. Even if we’ve found a planet, maybe it’s too late, maybe nobody is waiting for our signal.

He snaps his subconscious to order, confirms that the tapes show nothing, barring his own nightmare-generated peaks. Lory’s resting rates are a little up too, that’s within bounds. Tighe’s another fraction down since yesterday. Failing; why?

It’s time to pack up. Lory and Solange are waiting to come in and hook up for the final debriefing, as Yellaston courteously calls it. Aaron goes around into the Observation cubicle and prepares to observe.

Frank Foy bustles first onto his screen to run his response-standardizing questions. He’s still at it when Yellaston and the two scout commanders come in. Aaron is hating the scene again; he makes himself admit that Don and Tim are wearing decently neutral expressions. Space training, they must know all about bodily humiliation.