Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [39]
He didn’t have to think for very long to come up with the answer. Her name was Gerda.
He had dreamed of her before he woke—dreamed of the two of them, actually. They were embracing in the cloistered confines of a scarlet forest, her face turned up willingly toward his, her blue eyes glittering like sapphires in the moonlight.
Even here, Greyhorse was preoccupied with her, obsessed with her. She invaded his every thought, day and night.
If one of his patients had come to him and described such an obsession, he would have prescribed therapy. It wasn’t healthy to dwell on someone so often and so intensely.
He probably needed a psychiatric counselor. Unfortunately, Starfleet crews didn’t include such people, and he wasn’t going to leave the Stargazer to gain access to one of them—because if he did, he would be giving up his only chance to be with Gerda. A vicious cycle, he mused, if ever there was one.
The doctor propped himself up on an elbow. Whenever he woke in the middle of the night—which was often—he had a difficult time getting back to sleep unless he took a nice, long walk. He had a feeling that this instance would be no exception.
Of course, he reflected, he wouldn’t be walking the predictable, temperature-controlled corridors of a starship down here. He would be outside in the open, unfiltered air of Gnala. But then, that might actually make him sleepier.
Besides, his only alternative was to lie there until the others woke up, which might not be for hours, and that was a bleak prospect indeed. Rather than contemplate it, he unrolled his clothes, put them on as quietly as he could, and threaded his way softly past his colleagues until he reached the door.
Fortunately, it didn’t creak as he opened it. Feeling a breath of warm, moist air on his face, he knew he had made the right choice. As he stepped out into the darkness, he closed the door behind him.
As luck would have it, the sky was clear and crowded with stars, the air redolent with scents that reminded him of mint and sage and other Earthly spices. A near-full moon frosted the mossy ground underfoot as if eager to guide his steps.
By the light of Gnala’s setting sun, the Northern Sanctum had looked like a colossal bloody dagger. By moonlight, it seemed even larger and more ominous. Likewise, the shaggy, wind-driven growth of forest surrounding it, where Greyhorse and the rest of the away team would be toiling after daybreak on Simenon’s behalf.
He didn’t want to lose his way in the depths of that forest—not after Ben Zoma had briefed him on the perils that awaited the unwary traveler. However, he wasn’t ready to go back inside their sleeping chamber yet, so he decided to simply walk a circuit around the sanctum.
As the doctor did this, the architecture of the place revealed itself to him line by craggy line. If the sanctum had seemed intricate and intriguing on the inside, its exterior was even more so.
What’s more, it featured a series of little alcoves, each one paved with small, flat stones and separated from the mossy ground by red walls. Greyhorse inspected a couple of the alcoves and found that there was nothing to see in them. By the time he got to the third one, he was ready to assume the same of it.
But he gave it a glance anyway—and discovered that it wasn’t quite the same as its predecessors, after all. For one thing, the ground wasn’t paved. It was the same mossy stuff that the doctor had been walking on.
For another thing, there was something embedded in it—something oval in outline, its surface rounded like a small hill, and so pale as to appear luminescent in the moonlight. His curiosity aroused, Greyhorse entered the alcove to take a closer look.
And saw that it was a stone.
At first, he thought it had been milled by a machine—that’s how smooth and regularly shaped it was. Then he saw the tiny imperfections in