The Ceres Solution

Chapter Eleven

It was night on 82 Eridani I, and Field Station 23 looked exactly as it had done when Gretana first saw it. The buildings on the edge of the circular plaza were throwing up a wash of light which over-painted all but the brightest stars, and there was the same sense of inner emptiness which told her that no planets swam in that region of space. There was, however, one vast difference in the circumstances of her arrival.

Beside her, at the centre of the radial mosaic, the crippled Terran was struggling into an upright attitude in his wheelchair.

Propping himself up on his arms, he looked at her and at the backdrop of angular luminosities. For a moment his asymmetrical features registered a blend of surprise and jubilation, and then—an abrupt reminder of why she had yielded to instinct—he slumped back unconscious, head lolling on to his chest. His hands slid from the chair’s armrests to swing limply beside the wheels.

“No, no,” Gretana breathed. She caught the handgrips at the back of the chair, turned it and began pushing it towards the station’s reception chamber. Lines of tesserae pulsed amber and white beneath her feet as she overcame the chair’s inertia and began to pick up speed. There was a movement of silhouettes ahead, accompanied by shouts and the sound of running feet, then Ichmo tye Railt was beside her and using his superior strength to drag the chair to a halt.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ichmo’s ill-proportioned face was taut with anger and shock. “You’ve got to go back.”

Gretana shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

“You haven’t any choice in the matter,” he shouted, overwhelming her with the sheer volume of sound as he pushed both her and the wheelchair back towards the centre of the plaza. “You’re going right now.”

“There were Terrans near the node. They might have seen me leave.”

“You’ll just have to wait till they leave.”

“That could take an hour,” Gretana insisted. “This man will be dead by then—and you’ll be responsible.”

“I’ll be…!” Ichmo released his hold and stepped back from Gretana, looking bemused. “That’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. You’re pulling me down with you.”

“You’ve got to decide your priorities,” she said coldly, two decades on Earth having accustomed her to verbal in-fighting. “Is your career more important than the life of another human being?”

“This is the first time anybody has done this.” Ichmo looked at the inert figure in the wheelchair and averted his gaze, but not before Gretana had seen the flicker of revulsion in his eyes. “Why are you here? Your next deposition isn’t due for some time.”

“I have to make a special report.”

“If it’s about the space colony business, we already have a…”

“I don’t care what you have,” Gretana snapped. “This man needs attention right now, and I’m going to see that he gets it.” She pushed the wheelchair past Ichmo, knowing as she did so that she was acting out of character, compensating for the uncertainties and alarms that were growing within her. It was quite possible that in the entire history of the Bureau no observer had ever broken the rules so flagrantly and spectacularly as she had just done, and she had no idea what the consequences would be. In particular, she could not anticipate Vekrynn’s reactions. All she could do for the moment was try to avert the final tragedy for the man in the wheelchair.

“Is this somebody you got friendly with?” Ichmo said, pacing beside her.

“I don’t even know his name.”

Ichmo looked distraught. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“I’m not sure. He’s been ill most of his life, but right now he’s suffering from exposure.”

“What do you expect us to do for him?”

“He needs heat most of all. And medical aid.”

“But we haven’t any doctors here.” Ichmo moved ahead to open the door to the reception chamber. “And even if we had, they wouldn’t know anything about Terran medicine.”

Gretana made no attempt to conceal her impatience. “Are you telling me that after five thousand years of stuffing data banks with information about Earth we haven’t the means to diagnose and treat a single illness?”

“That isn’t our function,” Ichmo grumbled.

“Well, I suggest that we start being flexible about our function,” Gretana said in a deceptively mild voice, “otherwise you’ll have a corpse to dispose of.”

Only later, while sitting alone beside the Terran’s bed, did she appreciate how heedlessly wilful she had been in threatening Ichmo with having to see a cadaver, a bleak experience which rarely befell any Mollanian. Another surprising aspect of her behaviour was that, for the first time in her life, she had interacted with other Mollanians without even once remembering her lack of beauty and letting herself be influenced by it. Am I changing? she wondered. Is this what Vekrynn was talking about when he said the Lucent Ideal was a parochial concept?

The room in which she was sitting was quiet except for occasional snuffles from the unconscious Terran, but for an hour it had been a centre of activity. Doctors had been summoned across light years from other Bureau establishments, specially prepared medication had been administered, officials of unknown rank had conferred with each other and had departed without speaking to Gretana. She had been isolated, made to feel as alien as the Terran himself, and knew without being told that she was to be dealt with by Vekrynn in person.

It was ironic, she decided, that her wish to meet Vekrynn again was being granted under such strange circumstances. He was bound to be angry, and the thought of it filled her with foreboding. She could only hope that the importance of what she had to report about Lorrest tye Thralen would be weighed against the seriousness of her crime.

In the confusion following her arrival at Station 23, Ichmo had neglected to enquire further into the reasons for her return, and now she was regarding the information as something like a trump card to be played at the most advantageous moment. And underlying her concern for her own future was the question of what was to be done with the pitifully frail Terran. Dennis Hargate, former inhabitant of Aristotle—as his papers identified him—appeared to be sleeping off a deep exhaustion, and if he remained unconscious until after Vekrynn could be consulted it might be allowable to teleport him back to Earth. He had seen little and possibly would remember or understand less, and it was almost certain that any story he told on Earth would be regarded as a product of delirium. That being the case, there was room to hope that the whole incident could be tidied up and forgotten, and that…

“Where am I?” Hargate said abruptly, disturbing the utter silence of the room with a thin nasal voice. He had not moved in any way, but his eyes were open and staring at the featureless ceiling.

Gretana, her nerves tingling, glanced around the room and saw there was little to distinguish it from any apartment on Earth. There was nothing about her Terran clothing to arouse suspicion, and if Hargate could be induced to go back to sleep—perhaps to be kept sedated—it could still be possible to return him to his own world.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” she soothed. “You’re in hospital.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“If I’m in hospital, why have I been laid out in my street clothes?”

The observance of the little Terran complicated Gretana’s tentative plans. “You’re going to be all right.”

“I can tell I’m going to be all right—that wasn’t the question,” Hargate said. “I want to know where I am.”

The note of impatience in his voice was another surprise—she would have expected bewilderment or panic. “Not far from Carsewell,” she floundered.

Hargate raised his hands a short distance and allowed them to fall. “How many light years?”

“I don’t understand,” Gretana said, suddenly aware that the fragile occupant of the bed, physically handicapped though he was, had an uncompromising flinty intelligence and that her chances of manipulating him were approximately nil.

“The place I saw isn’t on Earth—you aren’t keeping it secret—and there aren’t any other suitable worlds in the solar system.” Hargate’s voice was weak and he continued to stare at the ceiling. “That means I’m in a different star system—so I’m asking you if it’s close to Sol…or in a far part of the galaxy…or in a different galaxy altogether. It’s important for me to know where I am. Do you understand?”

“Twenty light years,” Gretana said, coming to terms with the new facts of the situation.

“So it’s 82 Eridani, assuming you go for G-type suns. Thank you. It makes me feel less helpless when I know exactly where I am, though in this case…” Hargate’s voice faded out for a moment, and when it returned he sounded almost like a child. “It was as good as a religion to me, you know…as good as magic…knowing there was a different game going on somewhere…with different rules…”

The halting words gave Gretana an intuitive and empathetic glimpse into a life other than her own, a life claustrophobically bounded by dark palisades of sickness and pain and all the wretched parameters of Earth, yet one which was lit from within by courage and imagination. And she, Gretana ty Iltha, had once regarded herself as the unluckiest creature in the universe because of a slight disproportion of her features. Shamed, prompted by a blend of curiosity and respect, she stood up and approached the bed. Hargate stared up at her for several seconds, and she saw his eyes widen in recognition.

“I thought I dreamed that part,” he said. “I saw you about twenty years ago, and you’re still twenty…It’s a bigger game than I thought, isn’t it?”

“I’m not allowed to say anything.”

“Oh? And were you allowed to kidnap me?”

Gretana had almost begun an indignant retort when she realised that Hargate was attempting to manipulate her. “The only reason I don’t seem to have aged is that my people have a much longer lifespan than the people of Earth,” she said, refusing to be ruffled. “Two decades is a very short time to us.”

“Really? And roughly how long do you manage to peg on for?”

“On average…” Gretana paused, oddly embarrassed. “Five thousand years.”

Five thou…!” Hargate raised himself up in the bed, then fell back on the pillow, smiling his one-sided smile.

“It’s a result of biological engineering,” Gretana said quickly. “The norm for a human planet is very much less.”

“You mean a mere couple of hundred years or so.”

“About seven hundred.”

“Christ!” Hargate lapsed into silence, and when he spoke again his voice was bitter, reflective. “What did we do wrong? Was it something we said?”

Gretana, uncomfortably aware of having disclosed too much, considered trying to explain that the presence of its giant, bloated Moon made Earth a seething cauldron of third-order forces which wreaked havoc on the genetic inheritance of every creature conceived within its influence; that the disruption of the sub-molecular building blocks at the most delicate phase of their existence was recipe for sickness and unreason; that conditions on Earth were so unfavourable for civilisation that it had even been theorised that an offshoot of humanity had been planted there by an ancient and malevolent experimenter. The explanation would be meaningless unless set in the entire Mollanian context, and if she provided that she would be compounding her crime against the Bureau. On the other hand, a man like Hargate was capable of deducing or guessing a great deal about the Bureau’s activities from what he already knew…

Resolving to confine herself to historical and philosophical generalities, Gretana began to expand Hargate’s mental horizons. Through much of the discourse he lay quite still, his eyes glittering and yet abstracted, like someone who was receiving a prolonged fix with a much-craved narcotic. Only when she reached the central issue was there an adverse reaction.

“You’re laying an awful lot of blame on the poor old Moon,” he said. “I can’t…I mean, it’s hard to accept that these third-order forces you talk about, forces you can’t even feel, could cause so much harm.”

“You can’t feel them—most non-Terrans would be very much aware of them.”

“But, according to what you say, you’ve been on Earth for years and they haven’t had any ill effect.”

“That’s because I’m an adult human,” Gretana explained again. “The vulnerable stage in an individual’s history is in the days following conception. I’m talking about humans now—there are many other races, differently structured, whose adult members couldn’t think of entering the Earth-Moon system for even a day. Others will risk very brief visits in specially shielded ships.”

“At least it’s an answer to the Fermi paradox—where is everybody?” Hargate frowned at the ceiling. “If two smallish bodies like the Earth and Moon set up all these bad vibes, how about binary stars?”

The point was one which Gretana recalled very clearly from an imprint. “As far as we know, no planet of a multiple star has ever evolved any kind of life.”

“I suppose it all fits. It isn’t even a pun to call us lunatics—the word directly associates the Moon with madness. It’s all so…” Hargate became silent again, his eyes sombre as he considered the history of his own world from a new vantage point.

“Perhaps you should get some sleep.”

“Sleep!” A corner of Hargate’s mouth twitched. “You know, some of our philosophers and most of our religious leaders always claimed that we had a special place in the scheme of things—but I don’t think the galactic freak show was what they had in mind.”

“It isn’t like that,” Gretana said, repressing a pang of irrational guilt. She began to outline the doctrinal reasons for Mollanian noninterference with other human worlds, then went on to the work of the Bureau of Wardens. Having started to speak, she found that apparently separate subjects were deeply interconnected. When dealing with recent events it proved difficult to avoid certain areas, and—with some prompting from Hargate—she confessed her belief that it was a Mollanian renegade who had sabotaged the Aristotle space colony. Somewhat to her surprise, Hargate’s interest in the fate of the space habitat was short-lived. He kept returning to the basics of Mollanian science and philosophy, particularly to the principles of non-cursive travel.

“Does that mean that Mollanians don’t use spacecraft at all?” he said.

She shook her head. “We use them, but mainly for bulk transport of raw materials and local travel where there aren’t any convenient nodes. They aren’t suitable for interstellar travel because of the light barrier. When it’s necessary to put a ship into another system, the components are usually skorded there separately and assembled.”

“I see.” In spite of the growing signs of tiredness, Hargate remained fascinated. “Do you think that somebody from Earth—me, for instance—could learn to skord?”

The idea was totally new to Gretana. “It might be possible—your ancestors must have had the ability.”

“What’s it like? How do you feel when you just step from star to star, world to world, and see everything change?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only travelled to Earth.”

“Huh?” Hargate stared at her with incredulous blue eyes. “You mean you could have walked the galaxy and you simply never bothered? My God, woman!”

Gretana was disturbed by an uncanny sense of having taken part in the same conversation at an earlier time, then it came to her that Hargate’s tone was exactly the same as the one Lorrest had used during their single meal together. All at once, it seemed, every man she met—hunted murderer or house-bound Terran—was assuming the right to treat her with open scorn. A surge of indignation sent her back to her chair. She had taken only two paces when she heard a flurry of movement and a low gasp. She turned and saw that Hargate, apparently having attempted to detain her, was lying askew on the bed. He was clutching his side and his eyes, opaque with pain, were locked with hers.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, trying to smile. “I’ll let you beat me at Indian wrestling.”

It dawned on her that Hargate, unaware that she too was under confinement, had assumed he was going to be left alone and the prospect had scared him. She went to the bed and, concealing her dismay at how light and feeble he was, helped him rearrange his limbs in a comfortable position. As a member of a disease-free race, she found it chastening to touch his wasted frame. The little Terran, unprepared and with zero physical resources, had been through experiences which could have reduced others to incoherence—and yet he had dared to criticise her way of life. Gretana gave a grudging smile as she realised that Hargate was quite unrepentant—he had pleaded and joked, but had not actually apologised.

“What’s funny?” he said tiredly, watching her with half-closed eyes.

“Perhaps you are,” she replied, aware that for the first time in their strange relationship she had begun to see him as a human being. “I’ve been answering all your questions—when do I get to hear something about you?”

“Apart from my triple career as a male model, tennis champion and computer designer, there isn’t much to tell.” Hargate allowed himself to be coaxed into an account of his life which grew more and more episodic as the effects of weakness and medication drew him closer to unconsciousness. In between times, Gretana told him something of her own past and hopes for the future, not really sure whether he was awake or asleep, and as she too grew tired it occurred to her that she had been waiting a long time for Vekrynn to arrive.

Perhaps what I’ve done won’t seem all that terrible to him, she thought, drifting into a sleepy euphoria. Perhaps, he’ll understand…