Blighted Star (4 page)

The
very end of the crescent shaped lake which gave the town its name finally came
into view through some low bushes, the water reflecting what was rapidly
becoming a night sky, and Williams fell to her favourite pattern of thought:
how to convince Sergeant Raoul that it would be a good idea to maintain a
permanent military presence in Crescent Waters… She guessed that in a way she
should count herself lucky; on the long journey here many relationships had
been formed by members of the platoon with people from the settler community.
By some unlucky chance, most of the other soldiers who had found romance had
paired up with people who’d ended up in Heart Lake, another whole day’s trek
further on, and they were only going to see their loved ones in the flesh when
decent amounts of leave coincided with an available shuttle ride. Oh well, she
supposed things would get easier as the colony established itself more fully. A
rail link was planned once the Olerite mine could supply the metal, and then
the three settlements would be mere minutes apart. She guessed then she would
live in Crescent with Mack and commute in most of the time. Weird, they came
all the way across the galaxy only to create somewhere which was just like
everywhere else. Still, what did she care, she’d signed up for this to get in
at the first bite of what promised to be some prime real estate . ”Like
everywhere else” was desirable in terms of property. ” Picturesque and
awe-inspiring” were great on holiday, but they didn’t beat safe and familiar
when it came to property prices…

The
soldiers skirted the edge of the great lake, moving through the dark landscape
to where, in the distance, the little town’s lights sparkled in welcome.

Gunnar
strolled on at a gentle pace through the landscape. The grass, wet from a
recent downpour, soaked the bottoms of his trousers unheeded. The pack on his
back had long since stopped chafing his shoulders and he felt a sense of
buoyancy which had been welling up in him for days. The feeling was indeed so
unfamiliar that it had taken him a while to realise that the strange fluttering
in his chest wasn’t an incipient heart condition. Gunnar realised with
astonishment that he was, in fact, happy.

Dwellers
in asteroid colonies were kept on a very tight leash of mood suppressing drugs.
Among other humans they gained in consequence the reputation of being laconic
and low-key. They in turn tended to find visitors rather unstable and even
borderline hysterical. Here on this alien world, far from the shafts, tunnels
and caverns of his birth, Gunnar was feeling so free that he expected at any
moment that his feet would lose their connection with the ground and that he
would simply float away into the cavernous blue shot with fluffs of white so
far above him.

Once
he had experienced a lightshow in the main cavern of the asteroid he had been
born in, he must have been about five years old and had been taken to a special
evening’s entertainment by one of his mothers and two of his fathers. The rest
of the communal family had elected to stay away, and looking up at the
reactions of his fathers to the show he had wondered why they had come
themselves. In fact, when he had looked around at the rest of the sparse
audience, it had been clear that most people had found something else to do
with their off shift, and the few who were there looked bored, uncomfortable,
or actually irritated.

Quite
simply, the show had been a projection onto the high smooth rock ceiling of a
series of planetary skyscapes: scudding clouds of various hues from the
different inhabited planets throughout the human diaspora. All the strange and
beautiful sunsets and moonrises that three centuries of spacefaring had brought
to mankind’s wondering eyes, right back to dust spectres on Mars and sulphuric
monsoons on Venus. There was even a special section on the blue sky of old
Earth with its billowing clouds of water vapour. Gunnar had been utterly
spellbound.

Looking
up at the ceiling he had glanced at his mother’s face, and had been transfixed;
she was by far his prettiest mother, though that wasn’t supposed to matter, and
she was his favourite, though you weren’t supposed to have favourites. Now as
she stood there, the blue light caused her to look ethereal, like a tunnel
fairy. She had a rapt expression on her face, and then he noticed droplets of
water running down her cheeks and even down her neck and over her delicate
collar bones and into her clothing. He wondered if the droplets came in some
way from the images of the clouds of water vapour, not having ever seen a human
being cry before.

The
two fathers broke the spell by an exchange of bored looks and some impatient,
dismissive joke. But before she turned a bright mask to them, his mother had
turned her face to his and they had shared a look of deep profundity. It was
the only time they were ever to be so close. Back in their quarters she
affected to agree with the fathers that the show had been a waste of time.
Gunnar had never forgiven her the betrayal. In fact, the moment in the cavern
was to be the only time during his whole life in the asteroids when he had felt
truly touched by another human. As he grew older, he joined various clusters,
but they never worked out for him, and he had always moved on, spending
increasingly long periods on his own. Throughout it all, he had never doubted
even for a moment that he would end up under a sky like the one he had seen in
the show. Yet for one reason or another, it had never happened for him. The
mood drugs had kept his depression at bay, and he had functioned efficiently as
a worker, digging he supposed, hundreds of kilometres of tunnel. Each night,
though, he had gone to sleep dreaming of stepping out of a spacecraft onto the
ground of some open planet.

In
the end, he had seen a cast of the probe work on Saunders, and the moment he
had seen the blue sky he had been sold. As soon as he had been accepted onto
the program he had told his current cluster of his decision, and they had taken
his departure, man woman and child, with the usual lack of feeling, one way or
another.

<><><> 

Johan
looked around him with an intense pleasure. Their camp was fully established.
The animals had suffered no ill effects from the long trek out here and were
already putting on condition in the fruitful pastures with which they were
surrounded. He gave a long and silent prayer of thanks. Above him the beacon
ridge glowed softly in the late afternoon sunlight. The soft evening breeze
brought with it a delicious smell of pancakes cooking on the fire of compacted
straw. Petre came and stood quietly beside him waiting respectfully. Johan
finished his prayer and turned to his little son.

“Ja,
jong. What is it?”

“Papa.
I have a present for you.” the child held out a tightly grasped fist.

“Oh
ho! A present for me? What can it be? I’m sure I don’t deserve a present.” He
bent his knees and lowered his tall frame so that he and his son were face to
face.

“You
do deserve a present because you are the best Papa anywhere in the whole…”
Petre sought the right word “Galaxy!”

“That’s
very kind of you. You are the best son in the whole Universe.” He cupped his
hand and Petre dropped something into it. It was a golden berry the size of a
gooseberry. Johan looked at it very carefully. It was one of the few types of
fruit indigenous to the planet, and had a smoky, sweet flavour. The children
had gone wild for it, running ahead of the wagons on the way here to harvest
each bush they had seen.

“Eat
it Papa!” Petre accompanied the instruction with appropriate gestures as if
teaching a baby “Eat it!”

“Eat
it? Certainly not. I’m going to treasure it forever.” Johan pretended to put it
in his top pocket.

“No
Papa! It’s for eating, not treasuring!” Petre was beginning to look concerned.

“Oh,
is it? Well perhaps we should eat it together. How would that be? You bite it
first then I’ll have the rest. We’ll eat it on the way back to camp.” He held
out his hand.

<><><> 

Christel’s
back was turned to him. She was driving him crazy. There was definitely
something going on and Jackson didn’t like it. She had been weird since he got
back from Crescent Waters. If he had done something wrong he had no idea what
it might be and she would do a lot better by telling him. Ever since they had
got together in the first year of the voyage she had known exactly how to play
him. He had no resistance to her, that was the trouble. He had never had
trouble like this with anyone else he had been with. But then no one else had
made him feel like she did. He reached out his hand and pushed her gently, she
turned her head slightly making a small angry noise, and carried on munching
her food. In front of them the corner of the room flickered with movement and
light as a 3D spooled out its banality. Someone was confronting someone else
about lies they had been telling. It was a long running real-time show from
Milano Prime and she followed the latest developments whenever she could. The
show had followed them out through space on their journey along with all the
latest news, gossip, sport and culture from across Humandom. Well, not the
latest, by now the communications they received had a two year delay.

He
reached out his foot this time and pushed her quite hard. She shrugged roughly
and threw “Don’t.” over her shoulder. She didn’t even look round. Jackson felt
like smashing the back of her skull in.

<><><> 

With
the widening distance between him and the nearest other people, the
overwhelming need to break away from his own kind had at last diminished. The
self-inflicted wound on his arm still throbbed a little, though the nanos had
long ago closed the wound and made a small mound of soft scar tissue where he
had cut into the flesh. Now he could accept the towns for what they were, a
handy source of future resupply. He also didn’t think he would ever miss human
company again, but on the other hand it was useful to know it was there if he
ever needed it. He pushed on through the knee high grass, still keeping
parallel to the track the Amish had taken. When the sun began its slow descent
towards the horizon, Gunnar began to look forward to the evening camp. Perhaps
at the next water he came to, or the one after that. This world had so many
beautiful lakes and ponds all reflecting the immensity of the blue sky, and any
one would be heaven to camp beside. He stopped and looked around him. In the
distance a low rocky ridge broke the flatness of the horizon. He decided to
make for that. 

<><><> 

The
organism that moved with the worm’s body was being pulled strongly, much more
strongly than it had been for millennia. It ignored the tiny pulses of the
invertebrates in the soil and turned instead towards the massive beacons of
life which had now appeared on its horizon. Without consciousness, blindly,
like a plant turning towards the sun, it turned towards the nearest of the life
- sources and began to inch its way through the soil.

<><><> 

The
lab bench was cool under his left hand and warm under his right. This was
because the golden sunlight fell across part of it while his own body cast the
shadow which made the left -hand side cool. He must have been standing there for
quite a while, lost in thought. He walked over to the window and looked out at
the busy quarry. In one sense the trouble was that they had encountered no
trouble. Maybe if they had some engineering problems he wouldn’t have time for
palaeontology. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that there was something important
he was missing. He sucked his teeth.

Outside
two quarrymen had finished attaching Anti - Gravity units to the four corners
of a large platform pallet. The pallet was piled high with iron sheeting ready
for dispatch to one of the settlements. The morning had started with a slight
chill from the rain which had fallen in the night, and both quarrymen had taken
off their jackets as the day had warmed up. Now on trying to pick his up, one
of them found that it was caught by its corner under the immense weight of the
day’s production on the pallet. His workmate turned back to see the quarryman’s
futile attempts to free the jacket and both laughed. In the window Jim grinned
and shook his head. The workers switched on the A/G and the twelve tonne pallet
bobbed up to the pre-set three feet. The jacket was whisked out and the two
men, still laughing, moved to switch off the A/G units. The next few moments
unfolded with a dreadful slowness as Jim watched, powerless.

One
of the men obviously thought of a new witticism on the subject of the jacket
and popped round the pallet to tell his friend. At that moment a Heavy Loader
was coming too fast the other way. The driver saw in time to swerve and the man
jumped the other way. Cursing, the driver stamped on the brakes. The Loader’s
tyres skidded on a puddle left over from the morning’s rain and the big vehicle
crunched into the floating pallet, crushing its front loading gear. The pallet
lurched, one corner coming slightly up, and it set off across the quarry at a
running pace, spinning slowly as it went. The spin sent the top few sheets
sliding and one of these bore a worker to the ground before slicing him neatly
across the chest, separating upper torso from the rest of his body. One arm was
chopped above the elbow, the other flapped against the metal for a moment then
was still.