Jacque closed the briefing room door behind him and nodded hello to everyone. He took a seat beside Carol. The soft leather creaking was the only sound in the room.
“Okay,” Tania said, looking up from her clipboard. “We’re all here. Jacque, this is our new teammate, Gustav Hasenfel, from Bremehauven. Jacque Lefavre.”
Jacque leaned over the seminar table to shake hands. “Guten Tag.” Pale blond hair, handsome strong features, tall, ineffable sadness in clear blue eyes. Handshake warm, dry, firm. Jacque did not like him.
“Tag. Sind Schweizer?”
“Ia naturlich. Mein Akzent?”
“Jawohi.”
“Hey,” Carol said. “Speak French or something.”
“Gus is a Tamer Two,” Tania said. “He’s had four missions.” Which meant, Jacque knew, that after his last mission retirement and/or death had reduced his team to two or three. Otherwise they wouldn’t have broken up his team; the AED liked to keep people together.
“Now,” Tania said, tapping the clipboard. “Two things; three things. Jacque and Gus, they’re tapping you for a breeding mission. Day after tomorrow, September second, 0536.”
“My poor overworked boy,” Carol whispered, humorlessly.
“Where will it be?” Gus asked.
“Sixty-one Cygni B. Fascinating place.”
“Indeed. We spent two months there, geoforming.”
She smiled. “I had a baby there last year.”
“I missed you by three years, then.”
Short silence while they nodded at each other. “The rest of us won’t be going out until next month. They did manage to fund another Groombridge expedition, a longer one. We’ll be there forty-seven days, starting October eleventh. With the mass spectrograph.”
“Starting geoformy?” Vivian asked.
“Probably not. The preliminary analysis is that Groombridge would be more trouble than it’s worth. What we’re to do, eventually, is set up a few buildings for a psychic research center. This mission is just to look for bridges. And isolate elements for an engineering team that’ll follow in a couple of weeks.
“They’ll have our work plans printed by the last week in September. Everybody except Jacque and Gus is on leave until the twenty-fifth.”
“How long is the breeding mission?” Jacque said.
“Twenty hours. Oh, here.” She tossed him a small plastic vial. “Take one every six hours, starting midnight tonight. And be a good boy.” She arched one eyebrow.
“Starting midnight,” Carol said.
Tania laughed. “Starting midnight. Don’t wear him out, though.
“Today the bridge slingshots back. They’re going to dissect it, starting nineteen hundred. Anybody who wants to watch is invited.”
Carol raised her hand. “Have they found out how Ch’ing died?”
“No. Depends on who you ask. Medical group says it has to have been the suit. Bioengineering says no. They’re still working on it.”
“That’s comforting,” Carol said.
Tania shrugged. “It’s happened before. I don’t know who to believe. Just hoping it wasn’t the suit.
“We’ll have a meeting on the twenty-fifth. Check your mailbox a few days before that; we’ll have some sort of preliminary research summary. The math committee and bio group have already published some findings, if you want to look them up.
“Otherwise, you’re free for a month. How many want to come to the dissection?” Everybody except Carol raised his hand; then she raised hers. “Fine, I’ll tell them. See you there.”
Jacque and Carol walked into town for an early supper. The Mexican restaurant wasn’t good, but it was better than the AED cafeteria.
“Why don’t we just skip the dissection?” Carol said after they’d ordered. “Spend a quiet evening at home.”
He laughed. “You act like I’m going off on some long journey.”
“Well, you are.”
“For less than a day.” He stirred the ice in his water glass. “Actually, I think you’re jealous.”
“I am not. Don’t be silly.”
“I don’t mean jealous of this particular woman. I mean the situation. That you have to stay in one place and make babies while I . . . flit around the galaxy like a horny butterfly.”
“I don’t brood on it.” He smiled at her pun. “Besides, it’s safer.”
“Do you know how long it’ll be before they...”
“Breed me? No. Tania says I ought to get at least two more regular jumps first. Then, if I follow her pattern, they’ll keep me pregnant for several years.”
“She had six?”
“Yes. But that’s unusual.” The waiter brought their plates: refried beans and some meatlike substance.
“If I were a girl I wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about it.”
“You get to meet lots of interesting men.” She tasted the food and then spooned hot sauce all over it. “What do you think of Gus?”
“He’s all right, I guess.”
She laughed. “The hell you say. If you could’ve seen you two sizing each other up. . .”
“Come on. I haven’t had two words with him.”
“Sure,” she said softly. “Did you hear what happened to him?”
“What?”
“We’re his third team. The first one, four people disappeared. Went out on a floater, and a little while later the super got four simultaneous death readings. Floater came back without a scratch on it.”
“That’s creepy enough. Find out what happened?”
“Never. No bodies, no suits, nothing. That was Seventy Ophiuchi A, about two years ago. The other was a geoformy accident, last year, Tau Ceti. Some kind of explosion killed half his team.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I get to briefing sessions early.”
They ate in silence for a while. Jacque poured the last of his beer. “Poor Gus,” he said. “Good thing we’re not superstitious.”
“Isn’t it, though.”
It was standing room only in the hyperbaric chamber, some thirty people keeping out of the way of Willard’s Bio Group and the holo team that was setting up to record the dissection.
A reporter from Science-News TFX asked Dr. Willard whether they would be looking for some particular feature.
“Actually, we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. What it’ll look like, that is. Obviously what we want is the organ responsible for its special talent.
“We’ve done neutron and neutrino scans on the creature; X-ray movies, you name it. As far as we can tell, it has no more nervous system than a grape. It’s little more than a hollow tube that takes food in at one end and expels waste at the other. And lets people read minds.”
He opened a black case and began to lay out glittering tools on the table in front of him. “There won’t be any anesthetic. If you’ll check your data summary, that’s experiment eleven, twenty-six August. As far as we could tell, nothing causes the creature pain. I don’t have any explanation for this. Even protozoa respond to trauma.
“Are Jacque Lefavre and Carol Wachal here?” They raised their hands. “Come on up, please. Would you mind helping out a little here?”
“Not at all,” Jacque said. Carol nodded. “We’re not sterile, though.”
“That’s all right, neither am I.” To the reporter:
“Lefavre and Wachal are the two Tamers most sensitive to the bridge effect.
“This is Dr. Jameson’s suggestion. We want the two Tamers to stay in contact with the bridge as the experiment proceeds. Hopefully, you’ll be able to tell us at what stage of the dissection the creature loses its power. And give us some subjective impression of, oh, the rate at which the power declines, whether it might peak or otherwise fluctuate . . . and so forth. All right?”
“We’ll try,” Jacque said. Carol was a little pale. As she’d told him on the way back from supper, she had an irrational fear of watching dissections. When she was five or six she’d seen a popular science show where they’d taken the heart out of a living turtle and kept it beating for weeks. She still had nightmares about that heart.
They positioned the two Tamers so they wouldn’t get in the way of the holo cameras. When they touched the bridge, Jacque caught the racing fear in Carol’s mind. He tried to radiate reassurance, tenderness. He only half-heard what Dr. Willard was saying.
“Nobody’s ever dissected one of these before, of course. The nudibranch, though, is a close structural analog.” He picked up a scalpel. “Accordingly, I will . . . I . . . will make a sss-will incision, hm. Along the dors-dors’l service. . .”
“Doctor-“ An aide reached toward him.
The scalpel clattered on the table. With a puzzled expression on his lined face, Willard clutched his chest and sat down on the floor. He fell over sideways without straightening.
The aide felt for a pulse. “Heart stopped,” he said. He ripped open the front of Willard’s tunic.
“Get him out of here!” Dr. Jameson shouted. “Get him out in the hall, oxygen, you-“ He pointed at another aide. “-call a floater!”
There was a lot of confusion, shouting, shoving through the crowd. Jameson asked that everybody except medical doctors stay inside the chamber until they got Willard on his way to the hospital.
After a few minutes, Jameson came back inside. He stood in front of the table and addressed the group.
“This is a terrible . . . thing. I’ve been after Bob-“ He pointed at the reporter. “This isn’t for publication. I’ve been after Bob for ten years or more to go get an implant, a cardiac implant. An eighty-year-old man who smokes and drinks the way he does. . . well, most of you know Bob. He said he’d get an implant the day he stopped playing tennis.
“They got here in four minutes and there’s a cardiac team scrubbed and waiting back at General. So they might be able to save him.
“Meanwhile . . . I’d like to keep posted on Bob, but we have less than an hour to finish up here, before the thing slingshots. So on with it.”
He went to the other side of the table and picked up the scalpel Willard had dropped. “Now I don’t claim to know half the invertebrate anatomy that Bob does. Is there anybody here who thinks they can do a better job?”
Nobody responded. “Speak up, God damn it. I’m not puffing rank here. How about you, Modibo? You did that damn slug last month.”
A big black man in the front of the crowd shook his head slowly. “Not out of any special expertise, doctor. I was just on deck at the right time.”
“You go ahead, Phil,” another said. “If we see anything, we’ll shout it out.”
“All right.” To Carol and Jacque: “You two grab hold of the thing.
“Now. Dorsal incision.” He brought the blade down and hesitated. “Hm. Dorsal.”
He looked up at Jacque and shook his head violently. Then he carefully raised the scalpel and slit his own throat.
To: Public Relations, Westinghouse International
From: Black & Morgenstern
Date: 11 November 2075
Subject: Text and Preliminary Camera Instructions, Four-Minute Public Interest Spot (for mid-point insert, Don Loft Show, 17 Jan 76)
SETTING: Craters of the Moon National Park
REQUIREMENTS: Animation lab; three (3) available-light holo cameras, three (3) actors, two (2) simulated GPEM suits, one (1) Westinghouse mass spectrograph.
Spot begins with a 30-second animated cartoon. First you have a simplified alien landscape, strange music. Five Tamers pop into existence, get out of formation and mill around, waiting.
The place they appeared from goes pop again, this time producing a pile of bricks, mortar, bricklaying tools. Music segues into a soft jissto as they start building a house. Tempo increases as they work faster and faster. New piles of bricks appear pop as they need them; it takes four piles to finish the house.
The Tamer-figures sit around the house, panting. Suddenly the music stops and the bottom layer of bricks disappears. The top three-fourths of the house falls with a resounding crash. This is repeated three more times, as each successive layer disappears.
The Tamers stand there scratching their heads. Then they also disappear. Fade into Craters of the Moon sequence.
(Camera positions given in conventional Cartesian style. Primary origin is ground level, centered underneath mass spectrograph, which will be placed on a level area 1250 meters NNW of benchmark 1728 (permissions bought from Park Service, Inc.). X-axis oriented 29° E of N. initially.)
time origin skew X Y Z
030 31,00,3 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 Shattered landscape.
035 31,00,3 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 VOICE OVER:
SLOW X-AXIS DRIFT TO (t = 33) “Nothing made on
045 10,00,2 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 the Earth can stay on
050 05,05,1 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 another planet.”
055 00,00,0 00 7.5,7.5,3.0
TIGHTEN TO (t=55) “This is the
065 00,00,0 00 2.0,2.0,2.0 machine that gave humankind the stars.”
SKEW ROLL (t = 70) “The Westinghouse
075 00,00,0 -180 1.5,1.5,2.0 . . . Mass Spectrograph.”
HOLD THIS (t = 72) “The two Tamers,
CONFIGURATION TO walking together, approach
101 00,00,0 -180 1.5,1.5,2.0 the machine. They are carrying
great armloads of
SLOW rock, which they dump onto
SQUEEZE/SKEW/DROP an already-large pile beside
102 00,00,0 175 1.4,1.4,1.9 the machine
103 00,00,0 -170 1.3,1.3,1.9
104 00,00,0 -166 1.2,1.2,1.8 VOICE OVER:
105 00,00,0 -163 1.1,1.1,1.8 (t = 88) “They don’t use
106 00,00,0 -161 1.0,1.0,1.7 the Westinghouse Mass
107 00,00,0 -159 0.9,0.9,1.7 Spectrograph to build brick
108 00,00,0 -158 0.9,0.9,1.6 houses. They use it to
109 00,00,0 -157 0.9,0.9,1.6 isolate pure elements . . .
110 00,00,0 -156 0.9,0.9,1.6 to build the machines . . .
111 00,00,0 -155 0.9,0.9,1.6 that will turn this sterile
112 00,00,0 -154 0.9,0.9,1.6 world. . . into a paradise
113 00,00,0 -153 0.9,0.9,1.6 for future generations.”
BLUR SKEW: (t = 114) “This bank of
114 00,00,0 -098 0.9,0.9,1.6 dials and switches is a thing
that ancient alchemists sought for
all their lives:
the Philosopher’s Stone.
HOLD THIS (BEAT to t = 125) “Our
CONFIGURATION TO interest is not in changing
122 00,00,0 -098 0.9,0.9,1.6 base metals into gold, the
alchemist’s dream. Rather,
OUT AND SLIGHT UP we change rock into useful
(clear rock pile) metals.”
123 00,00,0 -098 1.0,1.0,1.7
124 00,00,0 -098 1.2,1.2,1.8 While VOICE OVER talks,
125 00,00,0 -098 1.4,1.4,1.9 the Tamers are filling the
126 00,00,0 -098 1.7,1.7,1.9 machine’s hopper with rock.
127 00,00,0 -098 2.1,2.1,1.9
128 00,00,0 -098 2.7,2.7,2.0 “The Westinghouse Mass
129 00,00,0 -098 3.5,3.5,2.0 Spectrograph has an inside
temperature so high that
HOLD THIS this rock is broken down
CONFIGURATION TO into individual molecules.
143 00,00,0 -098 3.5,3.5,2.0 It is able to sort through
these molecules and collect
SLOW SKEW those of any given element.”
(to other side of machine)
144 -096 (SAFETY NOTE: During
145 -094 this skew the holo team
146 -092 must be careful. Y-axis
147 -090 cameraman must wear
148 -088 thermal armor, as he comes
149 -086 within two meters of the
150 -084 machine’s exhaust beam.)
151 -082
152 -081 At t =156, one of the
153 -080 Tamers sets the machine’s
154 -079 controls.
155 -078
156 -077 (t =156) “Here, the
machine is being set to
HOLD SKEW TO produce the element silver.
161 -077 3.5,3.5,2.0 (BEAT to t = 173) “It will
process all that rock in
approximately fifteen seconds.”
FASTER SKEW, SLOW
SQUEEZE & DROP
162 -066 3.3,3.3,1.9
163 -055 3.1,3.1,1.8
164 -044 2.9,2.9,1.7
165 -033 2.7,2.7,1.6
166 -022 2.5,2.5,1.5
167 -011 2.3,2.3,1.4
168 000 2.1,2.1,1.3
169 011 1.9,1.9,1.2
170 022 1.8,1.8,1.1
171 032 1.8,1.8,1.1
172 042 1.8,1.8,1.1
173 052 1.8,1.8,1.1
174 060 1.8,1.8,1.1
175 067 1.7,1.7,1.1
176 073 1.6,1.6,1.1
177 077 1.5,1.5,1.1
178 080 1.4,1.4,1.1
179 081 1.3.1.3,1.1
180 082 1.2,1.2,1.1
181 082 1.1,1.1,1.1
182 082 1.0,1.0,1.1
183 082 0.9,0.9,1.1
184 082 0.8,0.8,1.1
HOLD THIS (t = 188) The nugget
CONFIGURATION TO appears in the output
187 082 0.8,0.8,1.1 hopper.
BLUR SQUEEZE VOICE OVER: “Silver!
188 082 0.3,0.3,1.1 (BEAT to t = 191) “Or
any other useful metal.
HOLD THIS “Tamer engineers will
CONFIGURATION TO use these metals to build
197 082 0.3,0.3,1.1 tools. . .”
CUT TO: (t = 198) “Tools to build
STOCK AED CUBAGE the machines for geoformy.
44/5398/0329-0345 (Tamer “And the elements to go
using lathe on surface of into those machines will
unimproved planet) FADE TO: also come from the
214 HOLD STATIC Westinghouse . . . Mass
REPLAY OF t =30 TO Spectrometer.”
219-221 SLOW FADE TO (t = 214) VOICE OVER:
STOCK AED CUBAGE
79/4760/0000-0008 (Lush “And given a year or
landscape, double sun in sky) two...
(DEFIANTLY)
CUT TO: “or ten-or fifty-“
230 (BEAT to t = 221) “There
STOCK WEST CUBAGE will be a new world where
PR001/0000-0010 men can live.
(Westinghouse sigil in front of
deepspace background. (BEAT to t = 226)
18°/sec. skew.) “Another fresh start for humankind.”
232 KEY IN
WESTINGHOUSE (t = 230) VOICE OVER:
ANTHEM “Westinghouse.
239.240 FADE OUT.
(t=232)“Building better worlds...
(t=234)“For you.”
(From Sermons from Science by Theodore Lasky, copyright © 2071, Broome Syndicate. Reprinted from the Washington PostTimes-Herald-Star-News, 25 November 2071:)
. . . the original plan, which was to use the LMT to set up automatic geoformy apparatus on one of the terrestrial companions of 61 Cygni A. People would then be transported to the new world by a so-called “generation ship.”
Take a cylindrical asteroid about ten kilometers long; hollow it out and geoform the inside. Spin it slowly, end over end, to produce artificial gravity. Give it a propulsion system and aim it at 61 Cygni, with several thousand people aboard. Depending on which design you used (i.e., how much money you could put into the project), the trip could last anywhere from twenty years to a thousand.
Hence the name. Generations, dozens of them, could be born and die along the way.
A woman named Jerry Kovaly made this cumbersome arrangement unnecessary.
Dr. Kovaly was a biologist in charge of the life sciences phase of geoformy on 61 Cygni A, in the late 2030’s. (It was she who coined the term “xenasthenia” to describe the sudden weakness and disorientation a Tamer feels back on earth, if he’s eaten food grown from another planet’s soil, when the alien molecules slingshot out of his body.)
61 Cygni A was an easy planet to geoform; people could walk unprotected on its surface almost from the start. It was the first planet whose native plants proved edible; it was the first planet on which a human child was conceived.
In the course of a routine physical before her fourth jump to 61 Cygni A, it was discovered that Dr. Kovaly was several weeks pregnant. There was a slight scandal, since her husband earthside was sterile by vasectomy: he sued for and was granted a divorce when Dr. Kovaly declared her intention to go ahead and have the baby (never revealing the father’s identity).
She also decided to give birth on 61 Cygni A, partly because her work there was in a crucial stage, partly because the idea of being the mother of the first human born off-planet appealed to her.
The baby, a boy, was born without any complications. A few weeks later Dr. Kovaly’s time was up for that jump. She gathered together the three others who had jumped with her, the “black box,” and her new son, and they returned to Earth.
At slingshot time, the child disappeared.
It was an alien artifact.
Besides being a terrible shock to Dr. Kovaly-she had been nursing the child at the time-the disappearance was scientifically and philosophically mystifying. Careful of the embryo’s health, Dr. Kovaly had not eaten any native food while pregnant, nor drunk any native water. So the molecules that passed into the embryo through her placenta were all Earth-molecules. The baby, made completely of Earth-stuff, should have stayed on Earth.
Dr. Kovaly went back to 61 Cygni A and deliberately got pregnant again. She gave birth on schedule. But this time-in an action some people condemned as heartless-she left the baby outside the black-box radius when she returned to Earth.
And the infant stayed on 61 Cygni A, permanently. The first human to be a bona fide citizen of another planet.
So there was an easy alternative to the generation ship. The AED began recruiting large numbers of women . . . a policy the AED first characterized with the motto “Carry the Seed.” A combination of ribald backlash and sarcastic comment made them drop the motto immediately.
But the policy still stands. The AED recruits three times as many female Tamers as male, and requires that they bear a minimum of two children on two different planets (and two more, if they want to extend their enlistment to “full career” status).
Genetic analysis is one of the most hard-to-pass tests that a potential Tamer must face. Any genetic predisposition toward diseases on the AED blacklist will fail a candidate, no matter how well-qualified he or she may be otherwise. And careful genealogies are kept on all geoformed planets: theoretically, no pairings are allowed between people more closely related than third cousin. This has not yet become a problem, since first-generation citizens of the Worlds are de facto employees of AED, intensely loyal, and dependent on the Agency from cradle to grave.
At this writing, there are 7,498 Worlds citizens, mostly first generation (the number is expected to double every decade or so for some time). The oldest is, of course, Primus Kovaly, who at the age of thirty-one has fathered five children. Reportedly he has resisted the temptation to name any of them Secundus.
(From Peacemaker: The Diaries of Jacque Lefavre, copyright © St. Martin’s TFX 2131.)
15 Sept 2051.
No entries for two weeks, been busy. Will try to get it all down.
61 Cygni B is an interesting place, more temperate than Earth, mostly forest and ocean. Gus and I made the jump in shirtsleeves with a two-man floater, Gus holding the black box. Considering how peaceful the planet is, we could hardly have landed in a worse situation.
We appeared about a meter over the surface of an ocean, and were immediately dashed by a huge wave. A storm was in progress. Both of us managed to hang on to the floater while it bobbed around in the foam, but it seemed to take forever to get aboard it. Like trying to reboard a capsized canoe.
I did finally get aboard and strapped in. Then I helped Gus up; once he was in the saddle I raised the windshield and we were off. Wanted to get above the storm before locking in on the homing beam. Took a long time because the winds were powerful and unpredictable, but eventually we were in the sunshine and locked in, about 800 kilometers (it turned out) from Starbase.
We flew for almost four hours. Only one sun was up, and we got thoroughly chilled. Occasionally we passed over islands (including one perfectly round atoll), but otherwise there wasn’t much to see.
Starbase is a little more than one kilometer inland, built on the bank of a wide slow river, surrounded by a sort of pine forest. Most of the buildings are made of logs and the streets are of crushed shell. A quiet, orderly place except for the children, of which there are thousands. It was early afternoon when we landed, though, and most of the youngsters were napping.
We floated down into a square in the middle of the town, where two people were playing a kind of bowling game. They didn’t seem surprised to see us, but pointed out the AED headquarters for us. It was a little cabin on the other side of the square, and the administrator wasn’t in (home for lunch and siesta). But he’d left a note pegged to the door that told us where our mates were.
The couple in the square sent us off in opposite directions: Gus toward a woman named Hester and me toward Ellen. We tried not to move with unseemly haste.
Ellen was waiting for me with a pot of herb tea and the disconcerting news that she was a little off schedule. According to her morning checkup, we’d have to wait at least eight hours.
We drank the tea and talked for a while. Ellen was in planetary atmospheres, specializing in tertiary weather control (so she could get a job on Earth if she got tired of being a Tamer). This would be her fourth and last child; the AED let her have it on 61 Cygnus B so she could take part in raising her eldest daughter.
I couldn’t pronounce her last name, which was African and had a strange “click” in the middle of it (her grandfather was a black American, descended from slaves, who fought in the second Revolution).
She was intelligent and attractive, and under other circumstances I would have enjoyed her company very much. She sensed my agitation, though, and suggested I take a stroll around Starbase: see the sights and come back in the evening.
The pills they give you to prepare for a breeding mission are supposed to maximize sperm count and motility, but as a side effect they induce a powerful and tenacious state of priapism. So being alone with a beautiful woman whom you can’t touch is rather unnerving.
I wandered around town for a few hours, plenty of time to see everything. In a nursery playground I saw a little black girl, about six, who might have been Ellen’s daughter. I wondered whether they had invented terms for relationships like “the man who is my brother’s father but otherwise not related.” Stepfather seems inadequate.
Outside of town I inspected the power station and logging camp, then borrowed a boat to row out into the river. Went back to the logging camp and helped a woman saw down a large tree. My time on the planet was costing the AED more than ten dollars a minute; they might as well get some work out of me.
Around dusk I went back into town. This time of year, it never got really dark, because 61 Cygni A came up about the time B set. It didn’t provide much heat, but was a good deal brighter than the full moon.
I found the planet’s only tavern, a small adjunct to the adults’ dining area. It was almost full, with five patrons. One of them was Gus.
He had accomplished his mission, of course. Hester was out on the river, checking crab pots; she was going to meet him here for the night’s party (everybody coming to watch us disappear). I started to tell him about my problems with Ellen, but he said he knew. The whole town knew.
The only drink was a strong sour beer that they served with ice, flavored with fruit juice. If you drink it fast enough and are careful to avoid the aroma, it’s sort of like a Berlinerweiss. We started talking about that, naturally enough in German, and stayed in German when the conversation shifted to women, our four barmates in particular. And that’s what started the trouble.
The German was the last straw, anyhow. I haven’t felt so edgy since school days, what with the physical discomfort, anxious clockwatching, drugs screwing up my hormones . . . and comparing my wretched state to Gus’s obvious comfort. And suspecting that I was the object of a certain amount of ribald speculation by the adults on the planet, ninety percent of whom were female.
Gus has that irritating Germanic habit of constantly correcting your grammar while you’re trying to talk, muttering the proper forms sotto voce. It got me rattled; in the course of assembling a complicated sentence I managed to use the wrong mood, and put the primary verb phrase in the wrong place, with the wrong declension.
He laughed.
I slugged him.
He was more startled than injured. I hit him on the shoulder, not too hard, but neither of us was accustomed to three-fourths gravity, and the blow was sufficient to tip his chair back. His Tamer reflexes took over; he twisted out of the chair, made a soft landing on fingertips and toe, and sprung back up.
I got out of my chair to help him, anger gone as quickly as it came. He looked at me in a puzzled way and explained that he hadn’t been laughing at my German, which wasn’t bad for one so out of practice, but at the unconscious pun I’d made on the verb schiessen. I apologized and laughed at the joke and tried to explain my mental state. He understood perfectly, he said, but was distant. I wondered what kind of report he was going to file.
An hour early, Ellen came to the tavern door and signaled me. We hustled back to her cabin. She proved to be a tender and humorous lover. My own performance was remarkable in certain unsettling ways, but she was accustomed to that. She said we would have to get together under more conventional circumstances one day.
And remarked wistfully that two of her three previous mates didn’t live long enough to keep their appointments.
Our going-away party was fun, but it was a little strange to be at an affair where most of the people were pregnant (the seven men who were stationed there semipermanently all wore vasectomy bracelets and a haggard look). The steamed “crabs”-if you can call something with twelve legs a crab-were exotic and delicious, a rare treat for the natives as well as for Gus and me. The children eat them all the time, but the adults have to strictly limit their intake of alien protein. Otherwise the slingshot xenasthenia can be fatal.
At the appointed time we jumped back to Colorado Springs. After a short debriefing we went our separate ways.
There was a note from Carol in my box, saying she had rented a cottage in Nassau for a couple of weeks. I was to call if I didn’t want to come; she would find another companion.
There was a Denver-Miami flight leaving the next hour. I managed to get on it, then chartered an aged floater to Nassau. I’d telephoned from Miami, so she was waiting for me at the Paradise Island heliport.
Tamers don’t make quite enough to stay on Paradise Island, not by an order of magnitude. We took a jinriksha to the place she’d rented on Nassau proper.
It had been some time since I’d gone anyplace more foreign than Denver, at least on earth. Nassau was full of strange sights and sounds and smells, and it was crowded. God, was it crowded. A half-million people on a tiny speck of land.
I’m as cynical as any Tamer about the highflown rhetoric the AED uses to justify its colonization program. Anyone with basic macroeconomics knows the real story. But the comparison was inevitable between this packed island and the bucolic village I’d left a few hours before. Maybe things will fall apart again; maybe this time will be the last time. One rash person in the right place and the earth could be a sterile cinder in seconds, but that’s been more-or-less true for a century.
Still, I was glad that all those babies were up there in the sky. And comforted that one of them would be partly me.
When we got inside the cottage Carol asked whether I had successfully “carried the seed.” I told her that it had been very much the other way around-and offered to demonstrate. The effects of the last pill hadn’t quite worn off, and I still had two of them left. She thought it sounded interesting.
Two days later I was so exhausted she had to go swimming without me. Mark Twain once wrote to the effect that there wasn’t a woman alive who couldn’t defeat any ten men at the ultimate battleground between the sexes. When I first read that I thought he was exaggerating. (And I probably would’ve envied the seven male captives of Starbase.)
We did other things while we were in the Islands: went to a festival, sailed in an ancient windjammer, swam and skindived all the time. Sunned and rested and read some good books. Will write more tomorrow morning. Can’t put off this stack of reports any longer.
I was glad to hear that Dr. Jameson lived. Vivian says he claims the bridge made him do it. Maybe it’s in this stack somewhere.
Text of postoperative interview between Dr. Raymond Sweeney (Chief, Psych Group) and Dr. Philip Jameson, 2 September 2051.
(Thirty seconds of introductory politeness)
JAMESON: Are you recording this, Ray?
SWEENEY: What makes you-
J: Come off it, Ray. I’m not being paranoid. We’ve worked together for over ten years, and I’ve never seen you wear a coat. You needed it to carry the recorder . . . because one shirt pocket has your cigarettes, and the other—
S: All right, Sherlock, I’m recording. You mind?
J: Why should I? It’s like I told the orderly-you talked with the orderly?
S: He didn’t understand what you said.
J: You mean he thought it was crazy.
S: Well...
J: Sounds crazy to me, too. But it is true. I didn’t try to commit suicide. That god-damned creature, that bridge, had control of me, made me cut my throat.
S: It did an expert job.
J: (Fingering scar) That it did. Right under the ear and then straight across the carotid, deep. Lucky I can talk.
S: The work of a skilled surgeon...
J: Bullshit, Sweeney. It obviously had access to my mind. (Pause) If I were going to commit suicide, I could do it more successfully, a thousand different ways. Not by opening an artery in a roomful of doctors, next door to a hospital.
S: Phil, most suicides don’t want to die. They want to be saved.
J: All right, I know that. But don’t you think it’s quite a coincidence? With what happened to poor Willard?
S: But Willard didn’t attempt suicide; he-
J: Had a heart attack, sure. Path of least resistance. (Pause) The creature tried for my heart, too, Ray. Just before I blanked out, I felt this tightness, squeezing in my chest. But my heart’s strong. It was easier for the creature to control my arm.
S: Blanked out?
J: That’s right. Just as I went to make the first incision. I felt dizzy and . . . thick, I don’t know. Then every thing went white and I woke up being prepped for surgery.
(Pause) Have they done an autopsy on Willard?
S: Yes.
J: Well?
S: It was inconclusive. We’re having specialists-
J: In other words, his heart stopped and nobody knows why.
S: We have to wait-
J: I rest my case, damn it! Ask your cardiac specialists what sort of heart ailment would cause a robust man to sit down and die quietly in seconds. That thing had control of him. It found the weakest part of his body and squeezed the life out of him.
S: That’s awfully dramatic.
J: What happened to me was pretty god-damned dramatic. I was there, Sweeney; I felt the thing take over. It just didn’t do as good a job on me as it did on Bob. And that first Tamer, the Chinese boy. . . . Has anyone talked to the two Tamers who were in contact when we tried to dissect it?
S: One of them’s on a mission. The other said that the bridge functioned normally up to the time when Willard or you touched it. Then it didn’t function at all.
(Pause) That’s what they expected, though. It’s never worked with three people.
J: I see. . . . Listen, Sweeney. I’ll make a deal with you. You can shrink my head all you want; I’ll cooperate a hundred per cent. If you conclude that I have suicidal tendencies, I’ll take an indefinite leave of absence.
S: I don’t think-
J: But. . . in the meantime, I teach you everything I know about invertebrate anatomy. And the next time they bring one of those creatures back...
S: I get to cut it up.
J: That’s right.
S: Fair enough. Unless you can convince me. I don’t think I have suicidal tendencies, either.