The Seeds of Time (22 page)

Clio followed him up to the flight deck.

The lights were dim on the bridge, the flight deck consoles pulsing spots of light, systems ready to jump into action. Russo sat in the captain’s chair, watched the screen at her side. Niang filled the monitor.

Shaw motioned Clio into the pilot’s chair, took the copilot seat himself. That was a good sign. The chairs on the bridge assigned status; you get your chair, you still got your rank. Clio swung her chair around, watched Russo’s profile. It was quiet up here, the hydraulics soughing away, like the sound of the captain’s thinking. Now and then the ping of metal, reminding them of the metal skull that held them together, physically, psychologically.

Russo swung to face them. Looked at Clio. All her years crouched in her face, pasty against her black hair. “Shaw says we go down and bring them back,” she said. “What do you say, Lieutenant?”

“I say ask them. They’ve got a comm unit.”

“No, Shaw says we take them home for trial. We go after them.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s nuts. They’ve got a jungle to hide in. We’d never find them.” Clio remembered Teeg, standing in the med-tent door, a black shape against the glare of floodlights outside, saying,
Think they’d ever find us?

Russo glanced up at Shaw.

“These men have killed three people,” he said. “We need to make an effort to bring them to trial. It’s our duty.”

This prissy, do-your-duty stance was a load of crap, after what they’d been through. Clio turned to him. “We did make an effort. We tried to get them to come back, that’s why Meng is here.”

Shaw bristled at her tone. “And Liu?”

Clio shrugged. “He was Teeg’s ally. I don’t know if he would come willingly.”

Russo grimaced. “I know. I talked to him.” She turned back to the monitor, where the blue surface of Niang wheeled ponderously by. A serene galaxy-like swirl over the ocean marked a hurricane. “I’ve been talking to them for over an hour. He’s solid with Teeg. Or seems to be. I believe him.”

“And Posie’s dead, sir? Confirmed dead?”

“Yes, dead.”

Clio closed her eyes. She had seen him sailing backward, struck hard by rifle fire. And she had lured him into the field, broke up his alliance with Teeg, brought him to his death. She helped to kill him. It felt lousy, even if it was self-defense.

Shaw cleared his throat. “They’re criminals. We should bring them home.” He looked pointedly at Russo. “Hear their story.”

Russo frowned mightily. “I’ve heard their story. And they’re lying.”

“Excuse me, sir, but that’s for a court to decide.” Shaw’s face was earnest, proper.

“Ideally, yes. But here and now, I’m the court.” Russo
was quiet for a long while. “Lieutenant, in your opinion, Teeg and Liu would fight us, if we went down?”

“Teeg would, yessir.”

“And in your opinion, he is mentally unstable?”

“He planned to commandeer the whole mission, dismantle the lander, kidnap at least three crew members, force them to have sex and procreate. He murdered Hillis and Posie. He threatened to kill me, tried to kill Meng.” Clio paused, staring at them. “I’d say he’s unstable. I’d say he’s freeping out of his mind.”

Russo looked up at Shaw. He held her gaze for a long while, then broke contact. She swung around to stare at Niang. Russo didn’t like ambiguity, Clio knew. By-the-book Russo just had to hate looking at that wild turquoise swamp below her, hiding the crew members who decided to break all the rules, and in doing so, just broke her career in Space Recon, once and for all.

Dive countdown droned on. Clio looked at the control panel. Left side for time, right side for space. As though they were separate, like gates at a bus terminal, and not actually the same, a continuum. The mind wanders off, thinking of it, loses hold. So you split the control panel in two, keep things in their places.

The Dive panel displayed its controls in a bank of lights and touchscreens, toggles and switches, giving the mystery of time the outward semblance of common mechanical function. You press buttons, visit the past, return to the present.

At this moment, Clio had her last vestige of real power. She sat at the Dive controls. Pointed them home-time. A fantasy occurred to her, that she could Dive back a week and find Hillis alive on Niang. It was a way of overcoming death, mind-bending and lethal in its own way, of course. But to see Hillis again … There would be no other chances. This was the last Dive.

The paradox, though. No one had ever traveled to the past within one’s “sphere of causality”—one’s own history. But the theories were frighteningly clear: if she saved
Hillis’ life, she would create an unresolvable paradox. For starters, there were at least six people who saw him die. This could not exist side by side with the same six people who saw him survive. The universe, Vandarthanan said, would not tolerate such a profound time paradox. No one knew the result. It was an experiment, he said, that must never be conducted.

She left the program intact. Headed home-time.

“Helm to you, Finn,” Russo was saying.

Clio nodded. “Yessir.”

Shaw cinched in his lap belt, leaned back, eyes closed.

She said her goodbyes to them all again, before Dive hit.
I never meant to leave you. I would have scattered your ashes, if I could. If they buried you, Mother, I hope you never knew
.

Clio eased the ship into motion, firing thrusters at half power to bring them to transition speed.
Starhawk
was headed out, gathering speed, rushing toward Dive, zooming in for their Dive point. Caught it. Niang’s system, its hot, blue star, flicked off the screen in an instant. The cabin air closed in around her, pressing the weight of time against her face, squeezing liquid out of her eyes.

And she was sick this time, very sick. Kept to her chair and fought for consciousness. Needed water. Knew she wouldn’t want it if she got it. Ran systems checks. Routine preserves sanity. Ran them again.

When her stomach was under control, she went aft to medlab. Estevan lay on a pallet, breathing noisily. His face flickered a wan light, like a bulb giving out. She took his blood pressure. Not bad for a man on one lung. His hands were cold, and she rubbed them, thinking of the journey home.

They had taken the specimens out of the lander, transferring them to the science deck. The seed packets with Hillis’ writing on them, the seedlings and growths in clear specimen bags, cloudy with the moisture of transpiration. There was little enough of the Niang haul. Meng bemoaned the cache left behind, in the botany tent. Crew treated the
haul with feverish respect. Something good had come of the Niang disaster, they told themselves that. Something good.

Clio looked at the floor in medlab. Beneath her, on science deck, the Niang green, in strict quarantine.

She thought of the alien crash site she found on Niang, the deserted ship tucked into the botanical maze. How long had that ship been in the jungle; how long does metamorphosis take? How long before computer circuit boards gave up their metal fragments to the thin, blue tendrils?

How long before the first pinpoint holes in
Starhawk
’s hull?

Clio looked back at Estevan. His life pulsed under his skin, keeping faith. “We’ll make it,” Clio told him. “We’ve come this far, we’re gonna make it.”

Zee coaxed Clio into the chair and brought Mars into fine resolution on the screen. In the great rift valley of Vallis Marineris, the stupendous northern cliff faces were cloaked in shadow.
Starhawk
was still in good position to observe Mars, though the craft had entered home-time midway between Earth and Mars and was now hurtling away from it. Zee had been studying Mars for days, trying to interest Clio, wooing her with pictures, and stories of the world that humanity had still only seen close up on monitors, never on foot.

Zee shook his head. “I should have been born fifty years ago, when there was still such a thing as pure science.”

“You’re an astrophysicist. What’s that, if not pure science?”

“Yes, but, in the end, what am I accomplishing? Biotime was the only job I could get, you know. Otherwise, why do you think I’m with Recon and not in a research lab?”

Clio watched the red planet with a kind of nostalgia, thinking that the Niang seed, Earth’s salvation, meant, perhaps, the end of spaceflight, of all flight of metal. And as for pure research. Well.

Zee was still talking. “I was just born in the latter days, that’s all. The days when we came close to planetary death.”

“What did we hear, then, on the radio transmission? If it wasn’t planetary death, what was it?”

“A possibility. The ghost of Christmas Future paid us a little call.”

“And we would have done anything it took to avoid that future, right? No price too high?”

Zee looked at her, paying attention now. “I suppose not. No price too high.”

“Even pure science?”

Zee crumpled his lower lip, thinking.

Clio persisted. “If it came to that choice, would it be worth it? No price too high?”

“Are you thinking of Hillis again, Clio? That price?”

“No. I’m thinking of you, Zee. What price would you pay?”

He drew a deep breath, weighing her words. “Well then, I would say, against the whole body and history and future of humanity, even pure science could be given over. But how human we would be without it, I’m not sure. So no, no price too high.”

Clio was watching him intently. He laid his hand on her arm, questioning.

She nodded. “Thanks. I thought that’s what you’d say.”

Beneath them, on lower deck, the Niang seedlings settled into Meng’s watchful care.

Two weeks in-system,
Starhawk
began heating up. Cabin temperature was eighty-one degrees, crew were in T-shirts. Russo assigned Shaw to investigate the coolant system.

Meng noticed it first, and cooled down the science deck to keep the biota within ideal range. After twenty-four hours the cooling system strained its capacity, heating up the other decks to over ninety degrees, endangering the onboard electronics.

Shaw spent hours on lower deck checking out the water pumps and heat-exchanger system. A by-product of
Starhawk
’s electrical system was water. Oxygen and hydrogen were mixed chemically in fuel cells, creating twenty pounds of water every hour. This was fed to a series of pipes used for the galley and to pipes that would dump heat through the freon radiators in the equipment bay doors.

Clio and Zee were on the crew station, checking out systems, when Meng leaned her head in from the galley hatchway.

“Time to strip, boys and girls,” she said. “I need to bring the temp down another notch or our plants aren’t going to be happy. That means crew deck heats up a notch. I’m going on flight deck to tell the captain. Hope you can take the heat. You can always come down and do some real work on science deck, instead of staring at the scenery.” As she ducked her head back out and headed up the galley ladder to the bridge, her voice trailed off: “I’ve seen better pictures of Mars in
National Geographic.”

Zee stared after her. “She really works at being unpleasant, doesn’t she?”

Clio wiped the sweat off her face with the back of her hand. Cabin temperature was rivaling Niang’s and the air smelled even worse. “I think she misses Estevan,” Clio said. “He could take her on. It’s being ignored that she hates.”

“He’s not doing so hot, is he,” Zee said.

“No. Looks like he’s got pneumonia.”

Zee nodded, glum. Turned back to the screen. “Meng’s right about one thing. The pictures are lousy. We’ve been losing definition for days now.”

“Makes sense to me. We’re getting farther away all the time.”

“Right, but not at that fast a rate, to account for the interference.” Zee settled into his task at the controls, his arms glistening with sweat, looking better than Clio imagined he would without his shirt on.

Clio walked over to watch what he was doing.

“So what do you think it is?”

“Don’t know, but I’m working on it.”

“But what do you think it is?”

Zee was deep into the computer program, searching for something, working the keyboard. “Actually, I think the computer is affected. I think the program is failing.” He caught Clio’s eye. “I know. Not good.”

A little knot had begun to form in Clio’s stomach. Six weeks out from home. So close, so close.

Zee didn’t speak for a long time, fingers clicking away at the keyboard, deep into the ship’s systems, on a mission to find something. Then: “Holy shit.”

Clio sat bolt upright, leaned closer to the monitor. Zee was in the file showing capacity of the water storage tank, where the excess water not diverted to galley or freon radiators was stored, then dumped if not needed.

“Holy shit.” Zee said again. “We’re dumping one hundred sixty-five pounds of water overboard right this minute.”

“But we’re always dumping excess water overboard. We never can use all the water by-product, Zee.”

“That’s right, but this is way too much. Way too
much.” He swung around and headed out the hatchway. “I’m going to get Shaw. He should take a look at this.”