Wretched and dirty, Mark intended to creep wordlessly to his bedroom. But Ev snapped out of his reverie and looked around. “Wait a minute—what are you doing back? And your face is burned! What happened?”
Mark mumbled an explanation.
“Oh, no!” Ev leaped out of the armchair. “It’s probably been in the Netnews, which I have not been watching. I would have called and warned you! Damn it, your department should have!”
“Never mind.” Mark veered toward the kitchen to make the coffee that he never had this morning. His head ached. He fumbled with Ev’s coffeemaker. Following Mark into the kitchen, Ev hovered behind him offering sunburn ointment.
Clumsy and distracted, Mark knocked the coffeemaker over. Wet grounds spilled out of the gold filter cone onto the counter. Maik stared at the mess. It was hard to breathe and harder to speak. “Remember Samantha Berry’s last lecture? The new world?”
Ev leaned against the counter, “Um, yes. Ecology 401. Midway through the semester. ‘A new world,’ ” Ev quoted Samantha Berry. “ ‘Not just a bubble on a moon. And not an inferno like Venus or a frigid, desiccated desert like Mars. A green new world, if human colonists are smart and diligent enough to terraform it properly.’ ” That lecture had been Professor Berry’s way of announcing her resignation. Six weeks later the starship had left, with ten thousand colonists in cryostasis, to be revived hundreds of years in the future at an Earth-like world near a sunlike star. Berry was one of the colonists. Her colleague Annetine van Leeuwen took over teaching the Eco 401 course.
“There’s going to be another terraforming starship,” Mark said. “It’s being built now.”
“I know,” said Ev. “A family friend is the principal contractor, operating out of Luna Prime.”
“This one’s sponsored by the Genesis Foundation. They’ve asked me to go or at least serve as a consultant in the planning process. What they want to do they’re calling creation ecology, and it’s a lot like restoration ecology. I’ve made up my mind to do what I can to help them. And maybe when the ship leaves, I’ll go with it.”
Ev stared at him. “I don’t believe I just heard you say that. It’s the stress of the morning, isn’t it?”
At that moment, a roach crawled out of a cranny in the kitchen counter and ventured toward the spilled coffee grounds, feelers twitching. Mark’s stomach turned at the roach.
The land here had been coastal tallgrass prairie, with a delicate web of naturally evolved species. But prairie was supplanted by the city and the opportunistic species which exploded in that kind of ecological vacuum anywhere in the world. Pigeons, crab-grass, rats, gnats. And roaches. The city teemed with roaches, ubiquitous in the better neighborhoods even in spite of pest control and fastidious housekeeping. In the poorest areas they were a crawling, chitinous plague. The delicate web of species had been blasted. And he, Mark Willson, could not restore it. He slammed a fist down on the counter. The roach scuttled back into its crack. “I can’t stay here and watch the Earth die!” he yelled.
Ev said slowly, “I was thinking about the stars just before you came in.” He gestured toward the framed picture hanging on the living room wall.
The antique print depicted the star cluster called Pleiades shining across the night sky of a distant world. The print was pretty and precious.
Ev would never go to see any distant stars with his own eyes. Ev had everything he wanted here on Earth. And if that wasn’t enough, Ev was a citizen of the Solar System, cosmopolitan and comfortable with the offworld lifestyle in habitats and colonies.
Ev said, “I always thought you were the last man on Earth who’d talk about leaving for the stars.”
“I’m not,” Mark said. “You are.”
Ev smiled. The smile traced the lines of his grin, without any humor in his eyes, which made his expression seem nice a rictus. “I know. Don’t I have a lucrative job with the number-one genetic engineering corporation in the world? And I’m good at what I do. I can get blood out of a turnip. Blood and money. Out of turnips and mice and butterflies.”
Mark recoiled. He ground out the words, “You’ll get used to your job.”
“Should I? You help green things grow. But what I do—should I get used to it?”
Mark could not handle Ev’s problems and, if that was what this was, Ev’s guilt. Not now. Mark turned away.
“I am the taskmaster, living chromosomes are my slaves! Should I get used to that?” Ev insisted, following Mark back into the living room.
“What else?” Mark grated.
“It wasn’t just has-beens like Berry. Thousands of the best and brightest people went on that starship, too. Such as Joseph Norden. As in Norden dogs, Norden sprites, Norden twists. He was the best theoretical molecular biologist of this century. But he went to the stars.”
The Pleiades print, Mark belatedly noticed, had been shifted to a new spot higher on the wall, and Ev’s side-table moved beneath it, with a model of a spaceship and crystal vase on the table and fresh flowers in the vase. The arrangement looked incongruously like a shrine. “I think I need to go to the stars, too,” said Ev.
No, Mark thought. Ev would never do that. Not bright-eyed, mercurial Ev. “You don’t mean it.”
“Well, do you?”
“I said I’m thinking about going.
“And I am,” Mark said. His own voice sounded bleak.
In the middle of the following night, Mark had a nightmare. He woke up in a sweat with his heart fluttering, his limbs semi-paralyzed, his sunburned face hot and hurting.
His small bedroom was full of plants. In the faint night-city light from the window, the plants had dim gray and dreadful shapes. Mark groped for the switch to throw lamplight onto the plants and make them return to green normalcy.
It was the Pleiades. Ev’s picture had gotten to him.
Ev had found the print at an exclusive gallery Uptown a couple of years earlier, fallen in love with it, and purchased it on the spot with his father’s credit and his own good-sporting grin, while Mark boggled at the price. Mark had thought that he had gotten used to it, respecting the fact that it was classic space art though not to his own taste. It had a nice name. Ladies of the Lake. But the picture had finally unnerved him.
He had dreamed about that world with no living green, only ice mountains ringing a blue sea of nitrogen, bitterly cold to all eternity, beneath a night sky radiant with blue starshine. The cold burned. The stars’ irradiance would destroy the delicate molecules of any Earth-like life. Ladies of the Lake told him what the stars were like, the reality of space outside of the fold of the Earth.
Too tired to be fully awake, too disturbed to be fully asleep, Mark twisted in his bed, hagridden by seven sapphire stars.
Ev admired both views. This was a good table by an extraordinary window, beyond which the bright, benighted city of Houston stretched into the distance. The air swarmed with the firefly lights of the aircraft that, in this century, had replaced ground-going automobiles for the travel needs of people wealthy enough to own their private transportation.
The other and more immediate view which presented itself to him was that of Dr. Miraly Fiorenza, seated across the table. She had a thoughtful expression on an intelligent face, and a sapphire-blue blouse cut attractively low.
Miraly seemed interested in his account of disaster on the prairie and the decisions that ensued from it. “That was a year ago? Why aren’t you selling your possessions and living like a monk?”
Bingo, Ev thought. She really was interested. And not just in the story. He felt a pleasant flush of erotic feeling, and answered, “The ship won’t leave for another two years.”