Julia Ecklar: Tide of Stars

Illustration by Bob Eggteton

A stiff west wind punched at the balloon’s gondola from below. Rahel grabbed reflexively for the basket’s edge, forgetting for the moment that her intellect knew without doubt that the gondola couldn’t tip. It was an easy thing to forget this high up, with the wind shoving at her like an ill-trained dog and the night-dark water stretching from horizon to horizon so far below.

She closed her eyes on the glowing grids dancing across her retinas when the tactical display projected there tried to keep pace with the wild changes in her focus. Shutting out the display helped. Still, she waited for the gondola to steady before slipping a hand in front of the projection fiber and opening her eyes to reestablish her bearings.

The Odarkan Sea pooled in the darkness below them like a sheet of still, black metal. Rahel couldn’t even hear the lick and slap of gentle water movement, and the normally timid caress of this planet’s breezes wasn’t nearly enough to raise waves high enough to see from a couple hundred meters up. The only feature distinguishing this placid, land-bound sea from the sloughs around it was an ethereal thread of light stretching like sprinkles of stardust from the water’s black center toward where the mother ocean waited in the west.

Rahel realigned the overlay grid with the realtime planet surface, then double-blinked to freeze-frame the image. “Sector 23/26,” she said aloud. The computer picked out the individual jellyfish bodies among the long, glowing chain, and she counted them in rapid silence. “Medusae count: forty-two.”

Behind her, the click-tapping of pen on notebook screen told her that Paval still stood with his back against the gondola’s opposite rail, conscientiously keeping himself both out of her way, and out of the way of the pilot. “That brings our adult total to 115,” he reported softly. Rahel heard him log the number along with all the others.

As long as it makes him feel useful. She’d argued bitterly when Saiah informed her she’d have to take an apprentice on this assignment. Whoever the kid was, she’d maintained, he’d just get in the way. He’d be useless for running tests, because Rahel would have to explain every little thing to him instead of just taking the fast route and doing it herself. And he’d be bored doing nothing more than watching her collect samples and count slow-moving jellyfish. And he certainly wouldn’t learn anything, because Rahel didn’t intend to talk to him.

Saiah had a habit of listening to the opinions of everyone and their mother, though, then doing whatever he wanted. It was part of why he’d survived mentoring Rahel all those years before. “You pay ahead,” he’d told her simply. So on departure day she’d reported to the spaceport as usual, and found herself stuffed into a jumpship next to some young out-world Colonist with eyes as round and brown as a puppy’s, and a graceful lilt to his accent that would probably tell her exactly where he’d been raised if she cared enough to pay attention. It would be a long time before she forgave Saiah Innis for this.

“Even on a generous estimate,” Paval volunteered from behind her, “115 in our sample alone is a decline of nearly 62 percent since the census last year.”

Rahel didn’t comment, instead flicking the optic fiber away from her eye so that she could study the seascape below them without the computer grids interfering.

“That isn’t enough, is it?”

And here she’d set him the useless task of writing down the numbers because she thought it would keep him too busy to ask stupid questions.

She pulled the phone from her field vest pocket and punched the contact button with her thumb. “Nils?” She heard the other proctor pick up, so didn’t wait for him to acknowledge. “What’s your total?”

“I’ve just completed my last sector.” His voice over the comm unit sounded flat and thin against the background hissing of wind across his own phone’s mouthpiece. “I totaled in at 203 ”

“That brings us up to 318.”

Rahel knew the number even before Paval dutifully reported it.

“That isn’t enough.” This time the apprentice wasn’t asking her. And, no, it wasn’t enough.

Rahel turned away from the depressingly empty waters and lifted the phone to her ear again. “OK, bring it in,” she told Nils. Across the gondola from her, she could see Paval quietly close up his notebook and slip his pen into its slot. “We’ll pick up again in the morning, do another count tomorrow night.”

“What? You’re actually going to let us unpack and find our sleeping rooms?” Nils’s voice danced with feigned surprise. “But, Rahel, we’ve only been onplanet six hours! You must be getting soft in your old age.” She closed the phone and thrust it back into her pocket.

“Turn us about, then, ma’am?”

“Yes, Jynn.” She answered the pilot without really looking at him. He perched, comfortably casual, in the little swing seat half-way up the rigging. She could just make out the lighter patterns on his clothes in the weak moonlight, but couldn’t see the features of his black-as-black face at all.

“I can’t help but hear all this talk about the jellyfish, ma’am.” Jynn’s ropes creaked and swung as he adjusted the balloon’s engine to ease them back toward the resort. Rahel felt the balloon stutter faintly, but never heard the silent motor engage. “The jellies are going to be all right, aren’t they? Mr. Sadena called for Noah’s Ark in time, didn’t he?”

Paval turned his pale face up toward Jynn and opened his mouth as if to answer. Rahel spoke before her apprentice had a chance to form his first word. “That’s something we’ll have to take up with Mr. Sadena, Jynn.” She caught Paval’s eyes when he jerked a look at her, pointedly not letting him go. “Like Proctor Oberjen says, we’ve only been here six hours. We’ve still got a lot of questions to answer.”

Much to Rahel’s surprise, Paval only nodded mutely and turned to look out over the water. She could tell by the strength with which he gripped his hands together when he leaned across the rail that he didn’t agree with her decision to keep the details from the locals. But he’d listened to her, and done what she said without fighting. For a young man his age, that in itself was a miracle.

Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all.

Even at night, the shoreline of the Odarkan Sea was a riot of organic activity. Fist-sized moths, their wings flashing whitely in the dim illumination, bumbled from treetop to tree-top, shore to shadow. Swamp lights licked brief, cold fire against knotted, moss-hung trunks while some slow, nocturnal herbivore splashed its way through the shallow waters. Two hundred meters higher up, Rahel wrinkled her nose against the sharply rotten smell that feathered up from the planteater’s footsteps.

The bugs down there must be awful, she reflected, watching the balloon’s shadow warp as it passed over the sleeping trees. She hoped they wouldn’t have to spend much ground time along the Odarkan coast. Tromping around in outbacks and jungles was one thing; tromping around in fetid, bug-choked sloughs was something else. Rahel had always been sanguine about being killed and quickly devoured by just about any predator she’d ever met. It was the process of being eaten one tiny nibble at a time that wore on her patience.

“If the flying is still making you dizzy, try focusing on objects that are farther away. They parallax more slowly and don’t disturb your eye.”