Starborne (28 page)

“
What for?”

“
To say that we did. Come on.”

Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make a
c
tual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upw
ard at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world:
h
uge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, bat-like beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.

There is nothing in the sky. No monsters.
Not even a cloud.

He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned od
or of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is def
i
nitely choking.

He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his fac
e
plate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible pla
net.

It is cold, harsh, thin air, the kind of air that Mars would have, pe
r
haps, if Mars had any air at all. There is a disagreeable medicinal unde
r
taste to it, bitter stuff: some unfamiliar trace element, no doubt, present in a quantity larger than Huw is
accustomed to getting in his air. But he sucks it in anyway in great sighing gusting intakes of breath.

Giovanna is looking at him worriedly. “
Why are you doing that?”
she asks.

Huw doesn
’
t want to say anything to her about airborne monsters, about huge r
ough-skinned wings clamping remorselessly down over his head to cut off his intake of air. He simply says, “
I
’
ve come a long di
s
tance to get here. I want to breathe the air of another world before I leave.”

“
And if breathing it is dangerous?”

“
Marcus was b
reathing it,”
Huw says. “
It
’
s just air. Oxygen and n
i
trogen and CO
2
and some other things. What danger can there be in that?”

“
Marcus is dead now.”

“
Not from breathing the air,”
says Huw. But after a couple of further inhalations he fastens his faceplate a
gain. His sampling of the atmo
s
phere of Planet A leaves an unpleasant chemical aftertaste in his nostrils and throat, but he suspects that there
’
s little significance to that, if any: for all he knows, it
’
s mere imagination, just another of Planet A
’
s chee
ry psychic tricks, one more turn of the screw.

They are here to explore. So they dutifully walk around a little, fifty meters this way, thirty the other. Giovanna prods at the sandy soil and discovers a colony of shining, metallic-looking insects just belo
w the surface, and they occupy her scientific curiosity for a minute or two.

But it is only too obvious that the same malaise of soul is afflicting them here as on the other continent. Huw keeps watching the sky for monsters; Giovanna is unable to focus he
r concentration very long on her investigations. The same fidgety fitfulness is afflicting them both, though neither has admitted it to the other yet. Whatever the effect is, it doesn
’
t seem to be a phenomenon confined to a single locality, not if two ran
d
om landings have produced the same results, but must emanate from the core of this world to its entire surface.

Huw looks toward Giovanna. She is outwardly calm, but her face is pale, sweat-shiny. Evidently she, like him, has already learned some technique
s for holding Planet A
’
s terrors at bay; but clearly it is as much of a full-time struggle for her as it is for him. A planet where you are always thirty seconds away from a wild shriek of horrible baseless fear is not a wise place to choose for mankind
’
s
second home.

“
It
’
s no good,”
he says. “
We might as well clear out of here.”

“
Yes. We might as well.”

They return to the ship. Marcus, unsurprisingly, is right where they left him in his acceleration chair. To find him anywhere else would have been real occ
asion for shock, and yet Huw is unable to avoid wincing as he sees the strapped-in corpse lying there. Giovanna, coming in behind him, appears to avert her eyes from the sight of Marcus as she enters her chair.

“
Well?”
she asks, as Huw starts setting up
flight instructions. “
Do we try one more time somewhere else?”

“
No,”
says Huw. “
Enough is enough.”

***

The year-captain says, “
You think it
’
s absolutely hopeless, then? That we wouldn
’
t ever get used to the mental effects?”

Huw spreads his thick-fingered
hands out before him, studying their fleshy tips rather than looking up at the other man. This is the third day since Huw
’
s return to the starship. He and Giovanna have just emerged from post-mission quarantine, after a thorough checkout to ascertain whet
h
er they have picked up potentially troublesome alien microorga
n
isms down below.

“
I can
’
t say that we wouldn
’
t
ever
get used to them,”
he tells the year-captain. “
How could I know that? In five hundred years, a tho
u
sand, we might come to love them. We might
miss all that sto
m
ach-turning disorientation if it were suddenly taken away. But I don
’
t think it
’
s very likely.”

“
It
’
s hard for me to understand how a planet could possibly put forth a psychic effect so powerful that
—”

“
It
’
s hard for me to understand it
too, old brother. But I felt it, and it was real, and like nothing I had ever felt in my life. A force, a power, acting on my mind. As though there
’
s some physical feature down there that has the property of working as a giant amplifier, maybe, and settin
g
up feedback loops within the nervous system of any complex organism. I
’
m not saying that that
’
s what it actually is, you understand. I
’
m simply telling you that the effect is
there
, for whatever reason, and it makes your flesh crawl. Made
my
flesh crawl.
Made Giovanna
’
s flesh crawl. Sent Marcus into such wild panic that he lost his mind completely. Of course, as I say, there
’
s always a chance that we could learn to live with it after a while. The human species is very adaptable that way. But would you
want
to live with it? What sort of price would we have to pay for living with it, eh, captain?”

The year-captain, monitoring Huw
’
s facial expressions and vocal i
n
flections with great care, is grateful that he had had someone like Huw available to send on this
mission. Huw is probably the most stable man on board, and certainly the most fearless, though it has crossed the year-captain
’
s mind that noisy blustering Paco runs him a close second. Huw has been shaken deeply by the landing on Planet A: no question of
that. And it isn
’
t simply Marcus
’
s death that has affected Huw so dee
p
ly. The planet itself seems to be the problem. The planet must be into
l
erable.

It is a matter of some regret to the year-captain that Planet A isn
’
t going to be suitable. He wants the ex
pedition quickly to find a place where it can settle, before their long confinement aboard the
Wotan
starts creating debilitating psychological effects. And he is sorry that he will not get a chance to explore Planet A
’
s surface himself, awful though the p
lace seems to be. But the intense negativity of Huw
’
s report leaves him no choice but to write Planet A off and get the starship heading out on the next leg of its quest.

He has said none of this aloud, though. Huw, left waiting for the year-captain to rep
ly to his last statement, eventually speaks up again himself. “
It
’
s a lousy world for us in any case, you know. Parts of it are dry and other parts are even drier. We
’
d have a tough time with agricu
l
ture and there doesn
’
t seem to be any native livestock at
all. We
—”

“
Yes. All right, Huw. We aren
’
t going to settle there.”

Huw
’
s taut face seems to break up in relief, as though he had pr
i
vately feared that the year-captain was going to insist on a colonizing landing despite everything. “
Damn right we aren
’
t,”
he says. “
I
’
m glad you agree with me on that.”
The two men stand. They are of about the same height, the year-captain maybe a centimeter or two taller, but Huw is twice as sturdy, a good forty kilos heavier. He catches the year-captain in a fierce bear-hu
g
. “
I had a very shitty time down there, old brother,”
Huw says softly, into the year-captain
’
s ear.

“
I know you did,”
says the year-captain. “
Come. We
’
re going to hold a memorial service for Marcus, now.”

***

The year-captain isn
’
t looking forward to this.
He had never expected such a thing to be part of his captainly responsibilities, and he has no very clear idea of what he is going to say. But it seems to be necessary to say something. The people of the
Wotan
have taken Marcus
’
s death very heavily indeed.

It isn
’
t that Marcus was such a central member of the society that the members of the expedition have constructed. He was quiet, maybe a li
t
tle shy, generally uncommunicative. At no time had he been part of the contingent of
Go
players, nor had he sought
to establish any sort of re
g
ular mating relationship aboard the ship. He had had brief unstructured liaisons, the captain knows, with Celeste and Imogen and Natasha, and possibly some others, but he had, so it seemed, always preferred to r
e
main in the lit
tle pool of a dozen or so voyagers who avoided any kind of formal extended sexual involvement with one particular person.

No, it is simply the fact that Marcus is dead, rather than that he fi
g
ured in any large way in the social life of the ship, that has s
tirred them all so deeply. They had been fifty; now they are forty-nine; their very first venture outside the sealed enclosure that is the starship had afflicted them with a subtraction. That is a grievous wound. And, then, too, there is the unbalance to
r
eckon with. There will not now be twenty-five neatly deployed couples when the engendering of children begins. Whether the voyagers would indeed have clung to the old bipolar trad
i
tions of marriage on the new Earth is not something that the year-captain or
anyone else knows at this time, of course. Those traditions have long been in disarray on Earth, and there is no necessary reason for reviving them in their ancient strict formality out among the stars. But now it is quite certain that some variation fro
m
tradition is going to be required eventually, because ideally everyone will be expected to play an active role in populating the new world, or so the general assumption goes at this point, and now it will be impossible to match every woman of the expedit
i
on with one and only one man. That may be a problem, event
u
ally. But the real problem is that the people of the
Wotan
had come to feel that they were living a life outside all mortali
ty, here within this machine that floats silently across space at unthinkable velocities, and that sweet illusion had been shattered the very first time a few of them had emerged from their ark.