The Ceres Solution

Chapter Five

Standing at the centre of the radial mosaic, at an invisible crossroads, Gretana composed an equation and knew its shape to be correct. She raised her right hand and traced a unique quintic curvature in the air, replacing the equation’s generalities with the specific values of the target address. For a barely perceptible instant there was a sense of resistance, of vast inertias being overcome, then the continuum yielded to her will.

The transfer took place.

And she gave an involuntary moan of dismay.

In spite of all her training and preparation, the onslaught of the Earth’s Moon upon her senses nearly brought Gretana to her knees. It glowered, loomed, dominated. She could feel it hanging nearby in space, only thirty diameters of the planet away, an enormous generator and reflector of chaotic third-order forces which stormed and sleeted through her being, obliterating her finer senses. Panic spumed behind her eyes.

I’m blind, she thought as she tried vainly to skry the major influence line connecting her present position to Station 23. I’m trapped! I’ll be here for ever!

Gradually, however, and with agonising slowness, she became aware that a tuning process was taking place in her mind. It was as though the roar of a giant waterfall was being faded into the background to enable her to pick out the sharper notes of individual rivulets. She waited, hardly breathing, for her sensory balance to be restored. The planet known as Mars was the first to exert an identifiable tug, then came the two giant worlds of the local system, closely followed by Venus and Mercury. At that point, having oriented herself in the matrix of planetary influences, Gretana opened her eyes.

She was standing in a quiet, tree-screened hollow. A spring murmured introspectively a few paces away from her to the right, and on the other side was a low shelf of mossy rock which formed a atural chair. Gretana nodded and, despite the slow-subsiding inner turmoil, almost smiled. The place had the feeling of rightness she always associated with a major permanent nodal point. It was as though Nature had been coaxed and guided by timeless forces into arranging the topography just so, into providing shelter and water and a place for the traveller to rest, as an affirmation of the Mollanian belief that life and matter were both synergistic and interactive. The fact that neither buildings nor ornamentation marked the spot was an indication that she had entered a blind world. She transferred the small suitcase, which had been provided by Ichmo, into her right hand and moved away through the copse in the direction of the nearby community of Carsewell.

Although Gretana’s knowledge of the area was good, it had been derived from maps and texts, and she was unprepared for the vividness of the sunlit reality which greeted her as she emerged from the shade of the trees. The statistics on overcrowding, famine deaths and pollution levels had led her to expect uniform vistas of smoke-laden squalor, but here were untrodden pastures, and in the middle distance swathes of forest land gradually yielding to blue-green ranges of hills—all without any obtrusive signs of habitation. The air was clean and scented by grass and…

Gretana gasped as she saw jewel-like flecks of blue and yellow here and there in the sloping meadow that lay ahead, and it came to her that the wild flowers were coloured. She picked several tiny blossoms and stared at them, entranced, trying to reconcile their incredible glowing actuality with the bare fact—she now recalled it from the recent imprint on Terran ecosystems—that many plants here were attractive to minute winged creatures called insects.

Why, she wondered, does Mollan import gold and pearls?

Something far away emitted a mechanical wailing sound and, tentatively identifying it as a train, she was reminded that she had hundreds of kilometres to travel to her assigned base area near Washington, D.C. It seemed prudent to cover as much of the distance as possible by daylight. She put the flowers into a pocket and walked briskly down the long slope, towards the unknown, rehearsing some of the salient facts of her new existence.

This is May 10th, 2002 AD. I am Greta Rushton, aged twenty, one, unmarried, American citizen, but grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland—which accounts for any atypical features of my accent or unfamiliarity with current American usage. My father was an oil company executive. Both he and my mother were killed in the Saudi Arabian revolution of 1997, but their overseas investments provide me with an adequate income which lets me indulge my interest in travel.

She reached the bottom of the meadow, crossed a small bridge which spanned a drainage ditch, and found herself at the side of a blacktop highway which was showing signs of disuse. Some distance beyond it was the edge of the Greenways housing development, which was actually the westernmost offshoot of the small city of Carsewell, but she knew that entering it without a resident’s identity disc would involve her in an exchange with security guards. It was, she felt, too soon for anything so taxing—her first conversations should be with disinterested parties.

She crossed the highway, walked a short distance to a link road and turned south on a two-lane orbital which curved away towards the city. Sensory overload, a continuous bombardment of new impressions, filled her with a bemused numbness, damping her reactions to the astounding fact that she, Gretana ty Iltha, was alone on the planet Earth—Earth!—and was committed to it for perhaps seven decades.

Her job, as outlined by Vekrynn, was simply to act as a human recording machine—reading, watching, listening without any conscious selection, receiving a general impression of how the populace in her assigned area reacted to the historical forces that shaped their everyday lives. She was also to return to Station 23 twice a year and make a “cerebric deposition”—a near-instantaneous process, akin to an educational imprint in reverse—which would be processed and fed into the Bureau’s data banks.

In some ways it was the least demanding job imaginable—except for the ambivalence of her feelings towards the Terrans. On the one hand there was a choking pity over the tragic brevity of their lives, on the other was the physical revulsion and fear inspired by beings who were condemned to wallow in sickness and death almost from the moment they were born, but who accepted their fate with such resignation.

It took her an hour to reach Carsewell’s Warren Station. The Bureau’s basic training enabled her to get through the procedure of buying a ticket and boarding the correct train, but all the while she was uncomfortably aware of something she had never experienced previously—the pressure of eyes. Men who were seated near her or were passing along the carriage were the most persistent, but she also found that women tended to stare at her for longer than seemed necessary, their expressions indecipherable and cool. She had been assured by the Bureau surgeons that her face was based on a computer amalgamation of many thousands of Earth women’s faces, and that it was therefore bound to be quite unremarkable to Terran eyes, but she was unable to rid herself of an uncomfortable feeling that somehow there had been a miscalculation.

You’ve got to relax, she told herself. Acting nervously is only going to make matters worse. She picked up a discarded newspaper and sheltered behind it, pretending to read as the train progressed slowly and haltingly down the Hudson River valley, but all the while she was absorbing images of the world which drifted by outside. Occasionally she caught glimpses of gardens and was spellbound by their banks of varicoloured blossoms.

She successfully changed trains at Peterson and again—having by-passed New York and Philadelphia—at a new super-junction in Wilmington for the last leg of the journey. The train was old, slow and shabby, and had a broken public address system which made it necessary for guards to patrol the carriages announcing the numerous halts. The sheer frequency of the stops impressed Gretana, but it was the onset of night which gave her her first real indication of the density of the area’s population. Nightfall on Mollan meant a generalised plunge into darkness, with some glimmerings of artificial light in the distance, but here the landscape—when viewed from an elevation—was a rich and complex pattern of beaded illuminations whose lines and clusters merged near the horizon into a continuous radiant haze. The unexpected beauty produced an easing of tension which in turn made her aware that she was very tired. She closed her eyes briefly, experirnenting with the possibility of sleep, and the sounds in the compartment seemed to grow faint…

“That’s right, baby—just you snuggle up to old Des and we’n have ourselves some fun.” The voice close to her ear jolted Gretana into wakefulness, but several seconds went by before she realised there was an arm around her shoulders. She tried to start upright, away from the black-clad young man, but he tightened his grip, drawing her into a forced intimacy with his body odour of dank leather and perspiration.

“I don’t think she ’ppreciates you none, Des,” said a shaven-headed youth, leaning towards Gretana from the opposite seat. He smiled, revealing teeth which had been enamelled blood-red. “She don’t look too happy.”

“Bull,” Gretana’s captor retorted. “She’s gotta get used to me, that’s all. What d’you say, honey?” He turned his head and pressed his mouth against her forehead. She felt his tongue flickering on her skin.

Temporarily paralysed with fright, she extended the radius of her awareness to take in the fact that the train was still swaying through the darkness and that the passengers who had been nearby before she slept appeared to have migrated to another section of the carriage. Using all her strength, she pushed herself away from the man’s embrace and into an upright position. He tried to pull her back to him but, somewhat to her surprise, she was able to resist him and break free. From arm’s length she saw that Des was shaven-headed and crimson-toothed like his companion.

“Hey!” His eyes grew round with wonderment. “We got ourselves some kinda circus strong lady here, Sal. A real athletic type.”

“Nice muscles,” Sal said approvingly. He was moving closer to Gretana, a red-grinning apparition, when a chubby man in guard’s uniform came through the nearest bulkhead door.

“Rockville next stop,” the man droned, then paused. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing—take a walk.” Sal stabbed his thumb in the direction of the far end of the carriage.

“I’m going to Rockville,” Gretana said quickly. “Would you please take my case?”

The guard nodded uncertainly and reached for the case, but Sal stood up and blocked his way. “Forget it!” He tilted his head and mined the case’s dangling name tag. “We’ll look after Greta’s bag.”

“I don’t know these men.” Gretana locked eyes with the guard. “Please help me. I want to get off the train.”

“This is a personal matter, chief,” Sal said, tapping the older man’s chest with a black-nailed finger. “You don’t want to butt into no personal matter, do you?”

The guard’s eyes clouded over as he looked away from Gretana. In that moment the door behind him slid open to reveal two male passengers in the carriage connecting space, looking as though they were preparing to disembark, and the darkness beyond the window was replaced by the slow-gliding lights of a station. Gretana, propelled by anxious strength, lunged upwards, snatched her case from the rack and—with a speed which almost defied natural laws—snaked past the human barriers and reached the carriage’s outer door. Within seconds she was down on the station platform and hurrying towards the exit. To her disappointment, the station was a small and unmanned affair with only a shed to house ticket machines and drinks vendors.

“I told you she didn’t ’ppreciate you, Des.” The voice came from only a few paces behind her. “I mean, that was embarrassing, man.”

“It all adds to the amusement, Sally boy.” Des did not sound amused. “You’ll see.”

Gretana glanced back and saw that, whereas the two leather-clad figures were very close, the few other passengers who had alighted seemed to have dispersed into the night. She broke into a run, but found it difficult to stride out efficiently with the constriction of the Earth-style skirt and shoes. One of her pursuers gave a derisive chuckle. She reached the concrete apron of the canopied building, ran across it towards the sparse lights of the street beyond and almost sobbed with relief when she saw a man in what she recognised as a police uniform. He was standing with his back against a black-and-white car, one thumb hooked into his belt, the other hand holding a white plastic cup to his lips. Gretana went straight to him.

“Please help me,” she gasped. “Those men…”

Des and Sal, feet slapping noisily, halted when they saw the Policeman, but—contrary to what Gretana had hoped and expected—showed no inclination to back away. They exchanged glances, nodded, and moved several paces closer.

“Come on, Greta.” Des spoke in a wheedling voice, as though patching up a quarrel.

“I don’t know these men,” Gretana said urgently to the policeman, who had not moved. “They assaulted me on the train. I had to run to get away from them.”

“Greta, you’re taking the joke too far,” Des warned. “The officer doesn’t have time to play games.”

The policeman lowered his cup, scanned Gretana’s face with thoughtful grey eyes, then turned to her pursuers. “You two Crows aren’t from around here, are you?”

“No, but…”

“In that case, maybe you should get back on the train.”

Des looked affronted. “I thought this was a free country. I thought a citizen still had freedom of choice about…”

“I’m giving you a free choice,” the policeman cut in, carefully setting his cup on the roof of the car. “Do you want to walk on the train, or be poured on?”

“That’s nice, from a public servant.” Des glanced from the policeman to Gretana and back again, and a grin spread on his face like the slow opening of a wound. “I get it—trouble with the old nightstick, huh?”

The policeman unfolded his body away from the car, making himself taller. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to hop on that train.”

“We’re going,” Des said with mock-sweetness. “Have a good night.” The two men turned and, flapping their loose black garments like plumage, loped back into the station and broke into an outright run as a bell rang on the train. Gretana waited until they had boarded one of the moving carriages before she dared relax.

“Thank you,” she said to the big man at her side. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been here.”

“I daresay you’d have come up with something,” he replied with an inflexion which she found puzzling. “Is that your name? Greta?”

“Yes. Greta Rushton.”

“Where do you live, Greta?”

“Silver Spring.” She had to concentrate to recall the assigned address. “Remington Avenue.”

“You got off the train one stop too soon.”

“I’ve already told you why,” Gretana said, aware of the begin-inss of a new uneasiness. The policeman’s youngish face was hard and unreadable.

“So you did.” The policeman looked at his green-glowing watch, then opened the passenger door of his car. “Get in the car, Greta.’ There won’t be another train for near-enough thirty minutes, and you might as well be comfortable.”

“All right.” Leaving her case beside the car, Gretana got into the vehicle. The interior smelled of rubber and smoke, and a radio mounted on the dash was emitting irregular fizzing sounds. The policeman dropped into the seat beside her and without any hesitation pulled Gretana towards him. His lips came down hard on her own, and at the same time she felt his hand slide under her jacket, the fingers encircling one of her breasts. Shocked, stifled and uncertain of how to react, she held herself perfectly still and tried to dredge up specific knowledge concerning sexual behaviour on Earth.

The average Terran female, came the implanted words, is fertile for approximately three decades, but the tempo of ovulation—set by the planet’s huge Moon—is only twenty-eight days, which means that, in contrast to the pattern on Mollan…

“What the hell!” The policeman abruptly pushed Gretana away from him and peered into her face. “Don’t get cute with me, Greta.”

She stared straight ahead, into stellar distances. “Please let me go.”

“Please let you go!” He studied her from beneath tightening brows. “You’re really playing it straight up, yes?”

She understood the question only by context. “Yes.”

“Then why are you wandering around by yourself at night, for Christ’s sake? All by yourself and done up like a…” The policeman paused, sighed heavily, then leaned across Gretana and Pushed open the door. “Take off!”

“Gladly.” She got out of the car, picked up her case and walked back to the station building. The black-and-white departed immediately with a querulous whine from its electric drive, leaving her totally alone in the darkness of the alien planet. She felt physically sick and afraid, wondering how many more encounters with ugliness there would be before she reached the comparative safety of her apartment. The nearer she came to her journey’s end the more hazardous it seemed and, as an ever-present accompaniment to her fears, the Moon was prowling like some obscene animal, far below the eastern horizon.

Incredibly, as far as Gretana was concerned, she was able to adapt to her new life within a matter of weeks.

The apartment had been leased on her behalf by a long-established Bureau worker, based in New Orleans, who had made the arrangements through a local real estate agency. It was part of a small modern block, exclusive enough to allow her to control the frequency of social contacts, but without being in any way ostentatious. For the first few days she spent most of her time in its shaded rooms, adjusting to the basic fact of being on Earth, experimenting with the stored food supply and cooking facilities, and watching a great deal of television.

She also devoted long periods to sitting at a mirror, staring at the stranger’s face in the glass—comparing it to those she saw in televised beauty advertisements—and trying to accommodate the idea that, by Earth standards, she might be beautiful. There was no way in which she could be certain, even after prolonged and intensive study, because the two cultures’ physical ideals were so divergent. The Bureau’s surgeons were not accustomed to dealing with female subjects, and it would have been ironic if, while aiming for the unremarkable median, they had created the exceptional. While such an accident could impair her ability to observe without being observed, its principal drawback would be on the personal level. The repulsiveness of Terran males was enough to cope with in itself without finding that she was a magnet for the appalling crudity of the sexual advances.

In time, however, Gretana developed her own defensive habits and routines. She left the apartment only in daylight hours, she learned to identify safe circumstances and locales, to choose the clothes which drew least attention, to comport herself with a hard, cool disdain which acted as an effective social barrier. The consequent loneliness of her existence, far from adding to the rigours of exile, was something for which she was deeply grateful.

It helped to insulate her and distance her from the daily cavalcade of despair. Pervasive images of statesmen who eyed their opposites in foreign nations with the total blank incomprehension of insects; gold-encrusted churches whose congregations coughed blood; thrill-killers in all their cankered varieties, from the rooftop sniper’s to the poisoners of school water supplies; corporate despoilers of the environment; Third World freedom fighters who severed the arms of UN-vaccinated children; heroin-billionaires; semi-literate teachers; wars and famines and professional exploiters of refugees; strikers who burned ambulances and turned the sick away from hospitals; testers of nerve gas and tenders of ICBMs…

And always there were the children—massively betrayed before they had even been born.

Her instinct for emotional survival forced Gretana, out of sheer necessity, to try stripping the Terrans of their humanity in her thoughts, to try regarding them as organic puppets acting out some incomprehensible black comedy whose final curtain—due, according to Vekrynn, in less than a century—would be a merciful release for all concerned. She was partially successful with regard to the adults, but the betrayal of the children was the source of a raw and rough-edged pain from which there was no escape.

In the early months she fuelled her spirit with hopes that Vekrynn would be physically present at Station 23 to greet her when she returned to make her first cerebric deposition, then she began to pray that he would not. There was a real chance that being with him, receiving a foretaste of her personal nirvana, would make it impossible for her to return to Earth. The actual event, subject of so much anticipation, proved anticlimactic. There was an uneventful trip north to Carsewell, a lonely walk through October mists to the nodal point—its screen of maples now dank and dripping with condensation—and the instantaneous transfer across twenty light years to find that not even Ichmo tye Railt was there in Person to receive her deposition. In less than an hour she was back on Earth and numbly making her way south to Silver Spring, hardly able to believe that the interstellar sortie had actually occurred. The bleak reality of Earth, she realised, was threatening to become her reality and would have to be fended off with greater vigour, driven back into containment.

Her second and third visits to Station 23 followed the same unremarkable pattern, conditioning Gretana to believe that the nodal point on Cotter’s Edge was so secluded as never to be visited by local inhabitants.

Spring came early in 2004, bringing unexpected relief from a hard winter in which power cuts and commodity shortages had been particularly severe. The mild weather prompted Gretana to make her bi-annual trip to Carsewell a few weeks earlier than usual and to combine the duty with a vacation. She rented an electric car and travelled north at a leisurely pace, making two overnight recharging stops, and it was quite early on a fine April morning when she pulled up on the quiet and now-familiar orbital road west of Carsewell. The sky was bright and busy, and the breezes which disturbed her hair and clothing might have blown from an alternative Earth which had never known pollution. She crossed the spiked-off interstate highway, but instead of going straight up the gradual hill decided to make a detour and approach the crest from the south.

As always, she felt wonderment that such unspoiled tracts of land could exist in a world where tactical nuclear weapons were in use almost daily in squabbles over patches of near-sterile desert. She paused to skry the position of the Moon, and was comforted to find that it was directly below her feet, which meant that the entire bulk of the planet was helping to shield her from its influence. Enjoying the unusual inner peace, she made a meandering approach to the nodal point. On reaching it, she stood in communion for several minutes, savouring the near-mystical pleasure of being at a junction of major skord lines. The ambience was typical—a kind of monastic seclusion combined, paradoxically, with the sense of interaction with the billowing universe. She was drawing upon it, replenishing herself, when the silence was broken by a movement only a few paces behind her.

She spun round in a sudden clamour of nerves. The boy who had got so close before being noticed was about twelve years old. He was supporting himself on two light-alloy crutches, and his eyes were staring at her with disconcerting intensity from a face which had been honed to a narrow triangle by illness. Gretana’s initial alarm was lost in a rush of pity.

“Hello,” she said, striving to appear unconcerned. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

The boy looked all about him with studied calmness. “It’s all right.”

“You don’t seem too sure about that,” she said, smiling.

There was a moment during which his eyes, enigmatic and troubled, held steadily on her own, then he began to turn away. “I have to go now.”

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” Gretana said urgently, starting forward. She checked herself as she saw the change of expression which signalled that he had been hurt and was about to strike back.

“You don’t know what I…” The rest of the boy’s words were lost to her as he fled, bobbing and lurching, into the obscurity of the winding tree-lanes. Sounds of his laboured progress disturbed the air for a few seconds, then Gretana was walled in by silence. She placed the palms of both hands on her temples and waited for the unsettling effect of the encounter to wear off. This is Earth, she told herself, trying to erase images of aged eyes in a young face. Nothing matters here. Nothing makes any difference…

Several minutes went by before she had regained her composure and was able to effect the transfer.

Subsequently, each time she approached the nodal point on Cotter’s Edge she did so with extra caution. And, even though the quiet place was always deserted, years went by before she could venture into it without the partial expectation that the same small boy—doomed, yet strangely indomitable—would be awaiting her arrival.