Starborne Read online

  The general reaction is one of surprise. Not that he would ask the biochemist Giovanna to make the journey — she is at least as qualified for the third slot as the year-captain himself, and perhaps more so — but that he has chosen two women for the group. Everyone has heard by this time of Paco’s primordial little pronunciamento about the inadvisability of risking useful wombs by letting any women at all go down to Planet A. And here is the year-captain sending not just one woman buttwo, a full 8 percent of the ship’s female complement. Is this some sort of direct rebuke of Paco? Or does the year-captain actually agree with Paco’s thesis, and is this the year-captain’s furious way of telling them all that his only recourse, now that they have prevented him from undertaking the trip, is to send Giovanna?

  Nobody knows, and no one is going to ask, and the year-captain plainly is not going to say. Huw, Innelda, and Giovanna it will be, and that is that. Huw and Giovanna, everyone recalls now, were lovers in the earliest days of the journey; they are still good friends; doubtless they will work well together. The choice meets with general approval.

  What is actually uppermost in the year-captain’s mind, however, is the simple fact that he is risking three priceless and irreplaceable lives on this enterprise. Men, women: that makes no difference to him. But he doesn’t want to lose anyone, and there is the possibility that he will, and he hates that idea. The trick is to choose a landing party made up of people who will be useful down there yet whose loss, if they should be lost, will not seriously cripple the ship.

  The planetary mission is absolutely necessary, of course. So far everything about Planet A’s habitability has checked out admirably, at least from this modest distance, and it is now incumbent on them to send someone down there who can learn at close range what the place is like. And those who are sent may very well not come back. There is always the possibility that ugly and even fatal surprises will be waiting on that alien world for the first human explorers. More to the point, though, there is risk even in the brief journey down from orbit. The drone probe in which the mission is to be made has been designed for maximum simplicity and reliability of operation, and it has been tested and retested, naturally. But it is only a machine. Machines fail. Some of them fail quickly and some of them fail only after thousands or hundreds of thousands of operations; but failure modes often are uncomfortably random things, and even a mechanism designed to fail no more often than once in a hundred billion times may nevertheless fail the very next time it is used.

  Failure — an explosion en route, a bad landing, a bungled lift-off — would mean loss of personnel. The Wotan’s personnel are not readily expendable, although some, just now, are less indispensable than others. The year-captain has given much thought to that in making his choices. There is a considerable degree of redundancy of skills aboard ship, yes, but certain people are more vital to the present purposes of the voyage at this point than others, and it would be a heavy blow to lose any of those. Huw is one of those — nobody is better equipped than Huw to cope with the unpredictabilities of an alien world’s terrain — but for that very reason he has to be part of this first mission. The year-captain hopes he comes back, of course, for there will almost certainly be other missions of this sort beyond it and Huw will be needed for those. But there is no avoiding sending Huw out on this one. Giovanna and Innelda would be serious losses, but there are others on board who could do their work almost as well. If they had been unwilling or unable to go, he might have chosen any of eight or ten others. But some had never been on the year-captain’s list. The ones he would not risk under any circumstances at this stage in the voyage are Hesper and Paco and Julia and Leon, Hesper because he is the one who finds them their worlds, Paco is the one who aims the ship toward them, Julia, the one who makes the ship follow the path that Paco has chosen, and Leon the one who keeps them in the prime of health while they wait to reach their new home. Since it is not at all sure at this moment that Planet A will be acceptable, other planets may need to be found, other galactic jumps must be planned for. Without the basic skills of those four, there is not likely ever to be demand for the skills of the others on board, the gene-bank operators and the agronomists and the construction engineers and such.

  There is one other non-expendable person: Noelle. The year-captain regards it as unthinkable to be sending Noelle out on a journey like this one. Noelle, you are a rare and precious flower. You are Earth’s salvation, Noelle. I would never place you at risk, never. Never.

  The year-captain summons her now. “Is transmission quality all right today?”

  The interference effect has been coming and going lately. The frequency of its occurrences is without discernible pattern. In any case it seems to have no connection with their position in space or with their proximity to any particular star.

  This is one of the better days, Noelle tells him.

  “Good,” he says. “Send forth the word, then. Let them know, back there on Earth, that we’re about to make our first planetary landing. Tell them to keep their fingers crossed for us. Maybe even to pray for us, if they can. They could look up how it’s done in some of the old books.”

  Noelle is staring at him in bewilderment.

  “Pray?”

  “It means asking for the special favor of the universal forces,” he explains. “Never mind. Just tell them that we’re sending three of our people out to see whether we’ve found a place where we can live.”

  For Huw this is the big moment of his career, the time when he takes the center of the stage and keeps it for all time. He is about to become the first human being to set foot on a planet of another star.

  He has spent the past three days reconfiguring the largest of the Wotan’s three drone probes for manual operation. Unlike the probe that has already gone down to Planet A, and a second one just like it that is also on board, this one is big enough to hold a crew of three or four people, and is intended for follow-up expeditions precisely of this sort. It is default-programmed for proxy operation from the mother ship, but Huw intends to be his own pilot on the trips to and from the planetary surface. And now, after three days of programming and simulations and rechecks, he has pronounced the little vessel ready to go.

  There has been one change in the personnel of the mission since the original three were named. During some celebratory horseplay in the baths involving Heinz, Paco, Natasha, and two or three others, Innelda has slipped on a soapy tile — she says she was pushed, somebody’s sly hand on her rump — and has badly sprained her leg. Leon says that she will be able to move about normally within five or six more days; but at the moment the best she can do is hobble, and Huw is unwilling to delay the expedition until she recovers, and the year-captain has backed him on that. So Marcus, whose planetographic expertise duplicates Innelda’s in many ways, has been chosen to replace her. Innelda is irate at missing her chance, but her protests to the year-captain fall on deaf ears. She will discover, before very long, that whoever it was who gave her that rude shove in the baths has done her a considerable favor; but that is the kind of thing that becomes apparent only after the fact.

  The space suit — clad figures of Huw, Giovanna, and Marcus constitute a grand and glorious procession as they march through the bowels of the ship toward the drone-probe hangar. Virtually everyone turns out to see them off, everyone except Noelle, who is drained and weary after her morning colloquy with her distant sister and has gone to lie down in her cabin, and the still-angry Innelda, who is sulking inher cabin like brooding Achilles. Huw leads the way, waving majestically to the assembled onlookers like the offshoot of the great Prince Madoc of Wales that he believes himself to be. Certainly his Celtic blood is at high fervor today. What is a little trip to Ganymede, or even Venus, next to this?

  He and Giovanna and Marcus settle into their cozy slots aboard the probe. Hatches close. Pressurizing begins. The Wotan’s launch bay opens and the probe slides forward, separates itself from its mother ship, emerges into open space.

  A t
iny nudge of acceleration, the merest touch of Huw’s finger against the control, and the probe breaks from orbit and begins to curl planetward. Soon enough the brown-blue-green bulk of Planet A is the only thing the three explorers can see from the port in front of their acceleration chairs. It is astonishing how big the planet looks as they near it. It is only an Earth-size planet, but it looms like a Jupiter before them. A year in the seclusion that is nospace has given them the feeling that the Wotan is the only object in the universe. But now there is another one.

  Though Huw is definitely in charge, and can override anything at any moment, the real work of calculating the landing orbit is being done by the Wotan’s drive intelligence. That’s only common sense. The intelligence knows how such things are done, and its reaction time is a thousand times quicker than Huw’s. So he watches, now and then nodding approvingly, as the landing operation unfolds. They are coming down near the coast of the least parched of the four desertlike continents. The climate appears to be the most temperate here, milder than in the interior and, so it would seem, blessed with somewhat higher precipitation levels. Huw is planning a trek to the ocean shore to try to get a reading on what sort of marine life, if any, this place may have.

  The ground, visible a few hundred kilometers below, seems pretty scruffy here, though: dry buff-brown fields, isolated patches of low contorted shrubs, a few minor blunt-nosed rocky outcroppings, but nothing in the way of really interesting geological formations. To the east, low hills are evident. Planet A does not appear to have much in the way of truly mountainous country. To Huw the landscape looks elderly and a little on the tired side. It is a flattened, eroded landscape, well worn, one that has been sitting out here doing nothing very much for a very long time.

  Not really a promising place to found New Earth, he thinks. But we are here, and we will see what there is to see.

  “Touchdown,” he tells the year-captain, sitting up there 20,000 kilometers away in the control cabin of the Wotan, as the drone makes a nice unassisted landing right in the heart of a large, broad, shallow bowl-shaped formation, perhaps the crater of some ancient cosmic collision, set in a great dry plateau.

  The landscape, Huw observes, does not seem all that wondrously Earthlike when viewed at very close range. The sky has a faint greenish tinge. The position of the sun is not quite what he would expect it to be: out of true by a few degrees of arc, just enough to be bothersome. The only living things in sight are little clumps of yellow-headed shrubs arrayed here and there around the sides of this sloping basin; they have peculiar jet-black corkscrew-twist trunks and oddly jutting branches, and they, too, seem very thoroughly otherworldly. Even the way they are situated is strange, for they grow in long, right elliptical rings, perhaps a hundred bushes to each ring, and each ring spaced in remarkable equidistance from its neighbors. As though this is a formal garden of some weird sort. But this is a desert, on an apparently uninhabited world, not anybody’s garden at all. Something feels wrong to him about these spacing patterns.

  The surrounding rock formations, jagged black pyramidal spires fifty or sixty meters high, have the same nonspecific wrongness. They announce, however subtly, that they have undergone processes of formation and erosion that are not quite the same as those the rocks of Earth have experienced.

  It is understood that Huw will be the first one to step outside. He is the master explorer; he is the captain of this little ship; this is his show, from first to last. He is eager to get outside, too, to clamber down that ladder and sink his boots into this extrasolar turf and utter whatever the first words of the first human visitor to a world of another star are going to be. But he is too canny an explorer to rush right out there, however eager he may be. There are housekeeping details to look after first. Determination and recording of their exact position, external temperature readings to take, geophysical soundings to make sure that the ship has not been set down in some precarious unstable place and will fall over the moment he starts to climb out of it, and so forth and so forth. All of that takes close to an hour.

  While this is going on Huw notices, after a time, that he has started to feel a little odd.

  Uneasy. Queasy. Even a little creepy, maybe.

  These are unusual feelings for him. Huw is a robust and ebullient man, to whom such sensations as dismay and apprehension and disquietude and agitation are utterly foreign. He is generally prudent and circumspect, useful traits in one who finds his greatest pleasure in entering unfamiliar and dangerous places, but a tendency toward anxiety is not part of his psychological makeup.

  He feels a good deal of anxiety now. He knows that what he feels can be called anxiety, because there is a strange knot in the pit of his stomach, and a curious lump has appeared in his throat that makes swallowing difficult, and he has read that these feelings are symptoms of anxiety, which is a species of fear. Up until now he has never experienced these symptoms, not that he can recall, nor has he experienced very much in the way of any other sort of fear, either.

  How very peculiar, he thinks. This place is far less threatening than Venus, where the temperature at its mildest was as hot as an oven and one whiff of the atmosphere would have killed him in an instant, and he hadn’t felt a bit of this stuff there. The worst that could have happened to him on Venus was that he would die, after all, and though he was far from ready for dying, Huw quite clearly had understood ahead of time that he might be putting himself in harm’s way by going there. Likewise when he had visited Mercury, and Ganymede, and roaring volcanic Io, and all the rest of the uncongenial but fascinating worlds and worldlets that his ventures had taken him to. So why these sensations of — fear! — as he sits here, fully space-suited, inside the sealed snug-as-a-bug environment of this elegantly designed and sturdily constructed little spaceship?

  It is almost time for extravehicular now. Huw steals a glance at Giovanna, cradled in the acceleration chair to his right, and at Marcus, on his other side. He can see only their faces. Neither one looks very cheerful. Marcus is frowning a little, but then, Marcus almost always frowns. Giovanna’s expression, too, might be a bit on the apprehensive side, and yet it might just be a look of deep concentration; no doubt she is contemplating the experiments she intends to carry out here.

  Huw remains mystified at his own attack of edginess. Is that a droplet of sweat running down the tip of his nose? Yes, yes, that is what it seems to be. And another one trickling across his forehead. He appears to be doing quite a bit of perspiring. He is actually beginning to feel very poorly indeed.

  Something I ate, maybe, he tells himself. My digestion is fundamentally sound but there is always the odd apple in the barrel, isn’t there?

  “Well, now,” he says to Giovanna and to Marcus, and to everyone listening aboard the Wotan. “The moment has arrived for me to go out and claim this land in the name of Henry Tudor.”

  He makes sure that his tone is a ringing, hearty one. His little private joke stirs no laughter among his companions. He doesn’t like that. And how curious, he thinks, that he needs towork at sounding hearty! He runs through one final suit-check and begins to set up the hatch-opening commands.

  “When I go out,” he says, “you stay put right where you are until I call for you, all right? Let’s make sure I’m okay before anybody tries to join me. I’ll give the signal and you come out next, Giovanna. We check how that goes and then I’ll call for you, Marcus. Is that clear?”

  They confirm that it is quite clear.

  The hatch is open. Huw crawls through the lock, pauses for a moment, begins to descend the ladder in slow stately strides, trying to remember those lines of poetry about stout Cortez silent on that peak in Darien — feeling like some watcher of the skies, was it, when a new planet swims into his ken?

  His left boot touches the surface of Planet A.

  “Jesus Goddamn Christ!” Huw cries, a piercing anachronistic yawp that rips not only into the earphones of his fellow explorers but also, alas, into the annals of exploration as the first re
corded statement of the first human visitor to an extrasolar planet.

  “Huw, are you all right?” Giovanna asks from within, and he can hear the year-captain’s voice coming over the line from the Wotan, asking the same thing. It must have been one devil of a yell, Huw thinks.

  “I’m fine,” he says, trying not to sound too shaky. “Turned my ankle a little when I put my foot down, that’s all.”

  He completes the descent and steps away from the drone probe.

  He is lying about his ankle and he is lying about feeling fine. He is, as a matter of fact, not feeling fine at all.

  He is experiencing some sort of descent into the jaws of Hell.

  The — uneasiness, anxiety, whatever it was — that he was feeling a few minutes ago on board the probe is nothing at all in comparison to this. The intensity of the discomfort has risen by several orders of magnitude — rose, actually, in the very instant that his boot touched the ground. It was the psychic equivalent of stepping on a fiery-hot metal griddle. And now he has passed beyond anxiety into some other kind of fear that is, perhaps, bordering on real terror. Panic, even.

  These feelings are all completely new to him. He finds it almost as terrifying to realize that he is capable of being afraid as it is to be experiencing this intense fear.

  Nor does Huw have any idea what it is that he might be afraid of. The fear is simplythere, a fact of existence, like his chin, like his left kneecap. It seems to be bubbling up out of the ground into him through his feet, passing up into his calves, his shins, his thighs, his groin, his gut.

  What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell—

  Huw knows he needs to regain control of himself. The last thing he wants is for any of the others to suspect what is going on inside him. No more than a few seconds have passed since his emergence from the probe, and his initial anguished screech is the only sign he has given thus far that anything is amiss.