Context (1/20)
by Deb Walsh
It sensed the disruption through its link with the Uly.
The dreamplane shivered with the small one's - the boy's - disquiet. The Alonzo was equally disturbed.
It did not understand. Death of a member of the community brought a sense of loss to the tribe, a gap which another must fill, but the dead one was returned to the Mother, and the cycle began anew. The loss of one gave birth to another. As the aliens had moved across the land, they had lost others, and those losses had been felt among the people of the Dreamplane, but none like this.
It could not touch the source of the dislocation. The lost one had not been returned to the earth, not like the others the aliens had lost. Unlike its own kind, there was nothing of those lost ones which could be reabsorbed into the cycle, merely a laying to rest of inanimate matter. Whatever made the aliens living was missing from the forms they buried under the soil. The forms decayed, and in their decay, they fed the soil, but there was no rebirth of beings like them. =
But the one who seemed to be the source of the distress that vibrated through the dreamplane had not been laid to rest in the soil. Its form did not feed the growing cycle. There was no way to reach the lost one, no way to begin to understand the meaning of this loss. No way for the earth to learn. No way to heal.
***
Voice of Danziger
"Yesterday morning, we were packing to leave Bennett's ship, each of us recovering - we thought - from the disease caused by feedback from a virus in the EVE computer to the biostat chips none of us knew we had.
Another gift from the Council. We were almost ready to pull out when Devon Adair collapsed. Our only doctor, Julia Heller, could not identify what was wrong with her, but it was obvious she was dying, and dying fast.
By afternoon, we had remanded her to a cryo-sleep capsule on that ship. By evening, Alonzo and I had gone over every system we could think of to determine the ship's integrity. This morning, we are packing to leave again, but this time, we are less than what we were yesterday. Devon Adair, the woman who brought us all here, sleeps, and the rest of us move on."
***
John Danziger sat on the edge of the bunk and stared at his hands. They were big hands, strong hands, with hard-won calluses. Talented hands, hands that could coax life out of the most recalcitrant equipment. But hands that could not heal. Hands that would not hold her again. His clenched those hands, and lifted his head, grimacing. These were hands that had far too many cares to carry, now that Devon Adair was lost to him, to the group.
He'd finished packing up the contents of the tent he shared with True, and now, he supposed, Uly. The only thing left was to fold up the cot on which he sat, and break down the tent itself. Outside the tent, the sounds of the camp being struck filled the air. The pace was slower than usual, not the relaxed mode of a well-trained group, but the funereal tempo of mourning.
There was very little talking out in the camp, and there was no laughter. He cocked his head to one side, listening for the sounds of his daughter, for Adair's son Uly, but the children were silent. There was nothing to drown out the keening of his heart.
"Knock it off, Danziger," he told himself angrily, wiped a hand over his stubbled face, and sniffed mightily. "This ain't gettin' us to New Pacifica. An' it sure as hell ain't bringin' Adair back."
Impatiently, he pulled his curly blond hair off his forehead and shook his head. He rose suddenly, and swept the tent flap out of the way to stalk out into the camp.
***
Activity was progressing, but at the speed the others were moving, they wouldn't be on the road much before mid-day. "Okay, buddy," he muttered to himself, "time to be a leader." To the people around him, he shouted, "Yo, people! Let's get a move on - we gotta get on the road if we're gonna make twenty klicks today!"
"Twenty klicks?" Morgan Martin groaned. Martin had been a petty bureaucrat back at the stations, and had acclimated to life on G889 grudgingly. If anyone was going to complain, it would always be Morgan. "C'mon, Danziger - there's no way we'll do twenty klicks today."
"Damn right if we don't start gettin' our asses in gear, Martin. An' that means you. You pack up the med-tent yet?"
"Julia won't let me," Martin whined, attempting to look pitiful for a moment before he obviously remembered he was talking to John Danziger. The default leader of the Eden Advance group glared at him, and Martin shrugged. "She's still in there, working. Maybe _you_ can get her to let me pack up."
"Maybe I can," Danziger agreed testily, brushing past Martin toward the med-tent. He paused at the entrance, looking at each member of the team in turn. "Get to it, folks! We've got a lot of ground to cover today!" Then he ducked into the med-tent.
"I'll cover _you_ with ground," Morgan muttered under his breath, but from an arched eyebrow from his wife Bess, demanded, "What?"
"Let's just get the camp packed up, okay, Morgan? And give John a break, will you? He's under a lot of strain," Bess reminded pointedly, glaring up at her husband from an improbably elfin face surrounded by unruly curls.
"Strain? _I'm_ under a lot of strain, Bess -" Morgan protested, smoothing his long hair back from his high forehead.
"Morgan. Get. To. Work."
***
"Not now, Danziger," Dr. Julia Heller said absently, waving him away as she continued to peer into her microscope.
"_Now_, Julia. We're packin' up to move on." He laid a hand on her shoulder to pull her away from her work, and she shrugged him off violently.
"No! I'm close, I know I am, Danziger! I just need more time!" She whirled around to face him, her midlength blonde hair in disarray, her face haggard with exhaustion and pain. Tears sparkled in her bright blue eyes as she looked up at him imploringly. "Another day, John. Give me another day before we move out -"
"Julia -"
"No." She swiveled back to her work, took a deep breath, and explained, "I know I can find what's wrong with Devon, John. We don't have to leave her behind.
I just need some more time -"
Gently, he grasped both her shoulders and squeezed.
"Julia, I made a promise to Devon. We have to go. We have to get to New Pacifica and get that colony set up.
We don't have the time, not now." Beneath his hands, her shoulders slumped forward, and he could feel the sobs wracking her slender body. He fought the urge to join her, instead, digging his fingers into her flesh, trying to force her to focus on him instead of her obsession. "Now, Julia. We have to go now." He didn't add that if they delayed much longer, he'd lose the heart to leave. They had to leave now, not only to keep to the schedule of reaching New Pacifica and getting the outpost set up in time for the colony ship's arrival, but so that he wouldn't lose his resolve. Leaving the ship and its precious contents behind was something he couldn't bear to think about, and so, he simply had to do it. "Please, Julia," he added, the ragged emotion that threatened to engulf him escaping in those two words.
Where orders and pleading had failed to distract her, his voice suddenly did. She turned around and looked up into his face with wonder. "John. She never knew, did she?"
Her eyes searched his, and he closed them in pain. A wry, agonized smile flitted briefly across his face.
"No. She never knew." It was as much of an admission as anyone had ever forced out of John Danziger, and he ached with the reality of it.
"Oh, John," Julia breathed, and her arms went round his waist as she hugged him. "I'm so sorry."
He endured the embrace in silence a moment, then disengaged himself. "Look, forget it, Heller, okay? I made a promise to a lady I intend to keep. I know you did, too, but yours can hold a while - mine can't.
Okay? So let's get this med-tent packed up and get on the road."
"All right," she agreed, brushing the back of her hand across her face. "I guess I can study the samples I took while we're travelling. If I come up with something -"
"The colony ship'll have aircraft - we'll be able to get back here quickly to test it out, okay?"
"In a year, yeah," she pointed out doubtfully.
"The cold-sleep capsule'll keep her safe, Julia. I checked those systems over myself - they're stable and secure. Alonzo helped - he's more familiar with the technology than I am. We won't have anything to worry about on that score. She's not gonna be in there long enough to suffer from cold-sleep sickness, right? Now - let's go?"
She sniffled once more and nodded. "Okay."
***
In the end, it was mid-day by the time the Eden Advance team pulled out of the camp they'd set up near the ancient sleep-jumper. Alonzo Solace, their youthfullooking cold-sleep pilot who had once flown such ships before the rest of them had been born, had returned to the hatch one more time to confirm for himself that the locking sequence was secure. John Danziger stood by his beloved vehicles, not looking toward the outmoded spacecraft. Not looking toward the tomb of the group's leader, Devon Adair. Finally, Alonzo rejoined the group, and they started off, slowly, mournfully.
Adair's son, Ulysses, or Uly for short, rode in the cab of their largest vehicle, the TransRover, with Danziger's daughter True, and the Yale-class cyborg tutor, Yale. The cyborg had had another name, in another life before the Council had altered and reprogrammed him and placed him in servitude as a cyborg, but he had not retaken that name when the memories had finally returned. Unlike most of the Yale cyborgs, this man had not been a violent criminal, but instead had been a political embarrassment to the Council - a military officer who had chosen mercy over duty when faced with a group of political dissidents.
Yale was who he had become, not a slave, but a member of the Adair family. And now a member of the Eden family, as well.
Yale knew that there were no real words that could bring succor to the group, although his vast library of religious philosophy and texts offered many choices.
This was a new planet, with new rules, and try as he might, he could not formulate the words that would ease their souls. As the TransRover ground its way along the uneven track, he thought about the children, and how this world had changed them.
His charges sat huddled next to him in the vehicle, silent as children should never be. Uly missed his mother terribly, the mother who had sacrificed everything in order to ensure his survival. It was due to that sacrifice that they were all here on this planet, G889.
Diagnosed early in his life with the deadly Syndrome, Uly had been handed a death sentence before his young life had really begun. Few doctors even acknowledged the Syndrome back on the stations which had become humankind's home, but it was those very stations that had given birth to the fatal disease. The sanitary, sterile environment of the stations, designed by Devon's own family over the past two hundred years, had created an immune deficiency in children of Uly's generation that had no cure. The only hope for children like Uly had been a natural environment, with real air, real sunshine, real growing things. The Earth, the birthplace of mankind, had long since been polluted beyond retribution, and only those unfortunates forced to work the last leavings of mankind's depredations still remained there. The Earth's environment had deteriorated to a cesspool of acid rain, congested waterways breeding disease, and exhausted earth.
G889 had been discovered, and it was there that Devon Adair had pinned all her hopes for her son's survival.
She had dedicated the previous six years of her life to launching the Eden mission, to colonize G889 with Syndrome children and their families. No Syndrome child had ever survived beyond their ninth birthday, and when the Eden Advance ship had broken free of the stations, Uly h been eight years old.
That departure had been spectacular and dangerous. The Council, the governing body of the stations, had sabotaged the mission, and the ship had been forced to depart nearly 24 hours ahead of schedule, ejecting a Council bomb before they passed through the station portal. The Council had also implanted a biochip in the brain of one of the Ops Crew, and that person had unknowingly damaged the ejectors for the main cargo pods. On coming out of a 22-year cold sleep, the Eden Advance crew had found themselves unable to safely eject the cargo pods and land, and had been forced to crash to the planet in isolated life pods. In the past six months, they had located survivors from two of the pods, but their own had landed thousands of miles east of their planned touchdown. Slowly, they were making their way across the continent toward New Pacifica, where they would set up an outpost to welcome the colony ship that hopefully still followed them here - a ship containing supplies they had lost in the crash, and 250 Syndrome families hoping for a cure.
G889 had offered a cure, in the form of an indigenous lifeform known as the Terrians. The Terrians had taken Uly and transformed him from the sickly Syndrome child of memory, to the robust young boy sitting beside Yale.
Uly had celebrated his ninth birthday that winter, an event that still made Yale shake his head in wonder.
The change had come with its own costs, and even now he wondered how human the boy remained. One look at Uly's withdrawn face, the tears that threatened as he resolutely refused to look back toward the ship, told Yale he had little to worry about. The Terrians themselves were without emotion, since they had excised that from their culture centuries ago. Uly was still Devon Adair's son, her hope for the future. Perhaps the hope for all their futures, since they must learn to live in harmony with the beings of this planet if they hoped to survive.
The existence of any intelligent species on G889 had been a shock for the Eden Advance crew, since Council dossiers had insisted the planet was uninhabited. They had since learned that not only had the Council known the planet was inhabited, it had also sent penal colonists and warrior cyborgs, ZEDs, to G889.
More recently, Eden Advance had learned that the Council had also dispatched scientists to study the planet, more than a generation ago, and those scientists had deemed the planet unsuitable for human life. The scientists, led by Bennett and Elizabeth Anson, may have made it unsuitable for human habitation by launching the Council computer EVE into orbit. None of the Eden Advance group had known about EVE, or its control over the biostat chips the Council has implanted in their brain stems without their knowledge.
It had been the virus implanted by Bennett in EVE's memory core that had caused them all to get sick, and Eben to die. Purging the virus had cured them all, except for Devon.
They had come here believing the planet to be free of the Council, free of disease, free of danger. They had learned the hard way that it was not. Elizabeth's ominous promise that the planet would reject humanity came too late for them. Too late for the colony ship.
Like it or not, humans were coming.
Yale placed his arm around Uly's shoulder and squeezed slightly. The boy looked up at him briefly, his expression blank, then turned his gaze back toward the road ahead. So much pain this young boy had endured in his short life. The certainty of death, the terror of the crash, the months of privation, and now the loss of his mother to some unnamed and incurable - so far - disease. Yale felt a moment of pride, another in a long succession of such moments, in the strength of the boy riding beside him.
And True. Danziger's only child, born of a mother held in neuro-stasis after being irreparably damaged in an EVA accident on one of the stations. Bright, sharpwitted, quick-tempered, and fiercely loyal, that was True. She was a good foil for Uly, never giving in to the boy's momentary lapses of self-pity, constantly challenging him, intellectually, physically and literally. Yale could not imagine how this trip might have gone had Uly not had someone near his own age with which to interact. Without someone to call friend, beyond his aged tutor.
True was the focus of all of John Danziger's being, his reason for living. Neither father nor daughter had ever intended to step upon the soil of G889. They had been part of the Advance team's Ops Crew, part of the group that would have helped the team land on the planet, and then simply make the return trip to the stations, and there take up their lives again. The crash had changed all that, forcing them to struggle to survive alongside the Advance team. There were times when their presence had spelled the difference between death and survival. True's incessant curiosity and high spirits had, on occasion, embroiled the party in situations which might have been avoided, but he could not conceive of this trek without her. Or Danziger.
Together, the Danzigers kept the vehicles running, the equipment working, and Danziger played the part of devil's advocate to Devon's unfailing optimism. He had become, in effect, her other half, the balancing influence that she so desperately needed in order to lead this group.
Yale turned his attention to John Danziger, and wondered just how the gruff mechanic was coping with finding himself without his own opposite number, his own balance. He suspected, as did many of the others, that there was more to his feelings toward Devon Adair than mere antagonism. He knew, better than anyone, just how confusing Devon had found her own emotions where Danziger was involved. He shook his head. So much time wasted. The levelling factor of life on this planet had thrown them together, high-level aristocrat and station drone, and made them equals. How equal, how suited, he doubted either of them realized.
In a way, he felt as though he were seeing them all for the first time. John Danziger, uncomfortable yet stoic in the role of leader instead of challenger. Alonzo Solace, for once the technical expert on the ancient sleep capsule instead of the grounded pilot and Terrian dreamer. Julia Heller, the lost and frightened young woman instead of their unemotional, chroma-tilted doctor. Bess Morgan, so often the soul of the group, its maternal influence, herself in need of mothering.
Morgan, her husband, uncomplaining for once. Baines, Walman, Magus and Cameron, each of them caught up in their own losses, their own thoughts. Eben Singh, the first of them to die in the valley behind them, had been one of them. And although they'd all felt that loss, he knew her closest friends felt it more than some.
It was a subdued and melancholy party that trudged along the rough path, and rode in the slow-moving vehicles. A party that, nine days ago, had been dying, and had left more than just an individual, albeit their leader, behind. They had all left a little piece of their souls behind. As the Rail disappeared over the ridge, he hoped they had not left behind more than they could afford.
***
From her vantage point on the crest of the hill overlooking the ... ship, her old memories told her ... Mary looked out across the valley and watched the Eden Advance team move slowly away. Since she had met them, back in the cold, dark days of the winter, she had remained close, yet out of reach of the team. She doubted they knew how close, since she'd turned her back on Yale's invitation to join them. They were her own kind, she knew. Yet she still longed for the song of the planet, the music of the dreamplane, the euphoric feeling of swimming through the earth. But all of that had been denied her when she'd chosen her own kind over the Terrians' justice. And so, she remained aloof, neither human nor Terrian. Simply Mary.
It had taken her some time to come to terms with being Mary again. Mary was the name her parents had given her, a name she had all but forgotten in the years since the Outcasts had killed them at the Biodome.
They had been something the Eden Advance people called "eco-terrorists," and they had been sent here as prisoners. They had died here, but she had found life.
Her Terrian name was unpronounceable in the human tongue, and she missed the lovely sound of it trilled on Terrian lips. She had never really noticed the differences between herself and the Terrians once they'd adopted her. They had become her people, and she had simply accepted life among them. That she had had to forage for food they did not need, since they absorbed their nutrients from the mother earth through osmosis, had never seemed important. That she had physical needs they did not share had been beneath notice. That she had pale skin, easily damaged, where the Terrians were tall and dark and pliant, more like the plants that hugged the earth than the animals that scurried along it, never seemed to matter. All that had mattered had been the joy of the earth, the unity of the dreamplane, the oneness of the People, the Terrians.
She didn't know if she regretted her decision to help Yale. He had admitted to a crime he had not committed because he believed himself to be irredeemable. The truth had been shown to him, and he had found the will to live, not die needlessly. Something about him had reached her, in that human part of her she'd forgotten, and she'd made her choice. She hadn't believed that her people would exile her for mercy, but mercy was not part of their makeup. The verdict had been delivered, and Terrian justice was justice, right or wrong. The earth rejected her. The dreamplane eluded her. The music of the Terrians was silent for her. She lived apart, outside. Like the Outcasts had. They had found redemption. She could only hope that she would one day, too.
Story Notes:
Okay, I've been lurking for quite some time now, eagerly snapping up each new piece of fan fiction that appears here or on Frank's wonderful web site. Seems like it's time for me to pay the piper, and offer my own fan fic for everyone else's enjoyment. I've been writing fan fiction for nigh on 20 years (yeah, I'm old .. : )
Another inevitable "get Devon out of that stupid cryotube" story ...
Another inevitable "get Devon out of that stupid cryotube" story ...