Starborne (29 page)

It was Julia who suggested to the year-captain that a memoria
l se
r
vice would be a good idea. A general catharsis, a public act of healing: that was what was needed. Everyone is stunned at the death, but some
—
Elizabeth, Althea, Jean-Claude, one or two others
—
seem alt
o
gether devastated. Bodies are self-healing, these
days, up to a point; minds, less so. Since the return of the landing party Leon has been di
s
pensing psychoactive drugs to those in need of chemical therapy; E
d
mund, Alberto, Maria, and Noori, all of whom have some gift for cou
n
selling, are making their hel
p available to the sorely troubled; the year-captain has even, to his great surprise, seen the usually uninvolved Noelle embracing a weeping, shaky Elizabeth in the baths, tenderly stroking Elizabeth
’
s shoulders as she sobs. Some communal acknow
l
edgment of
their general bereavement may be the best way of putting the matter to rest, Julia thought, and the year-captain agrees.

Everyone gathers at the usual place for a general assembly, and the year-captain puts his back against the usual bulkhead, facing them
all.

A performance, he thinks.

Suddenly he is an actor again, reminded vividly of that strange and altogether unlikely detour in his life, that sudden impulsive break in his twenty-fifth year with the person he had been until then. Plunging into the theat
er, reveling obsessively in the texts, studying the technique, how best to use his voice, how to stand, how to walk, learning in every way how to command the stage
—
offering himself as an instrument through which the classics might come forth, Aeschylus, S
h
akespeare, Sophocles, Strindberg, Shaw. There were no new plays, not any more; but he gave himself up to the great old ones. The theater as catharsis, just as Aristotle said: for the audience, for the performer, the age-old ritual of purgation of pity and
fear. And also the fame, the wild gaiety of it all, the debauchery, even, the actresses, the applause
—

That other self, that buried stratum of his past.

But today he finds it difficult, at first, to locate the proper words. It is not a matter of stage-frig
ht
—
he of all people wouldn
’
t worry about that
—
but rather of a sense of inadequacy, of fundamental awkwardness. He must be not only actor but playwright here. The year-captain
’
s di
s
passionate nature is perhaps not the one best suited, aboard this ship, for
the task at hand. But he is the captain, chosen overwhelmingly by their vote at the time of departure, and ratified again a year after that. He is the one who must speak to this issue.

“
Friends
—”
he begins, as his hesitation begins to pass from him. Every
face is turned toward him. He begins to feel comfortable. It is just like acting, after all. “
Friends, we are all greatly wounded by the loss of Marcus, and now we must all pray for healing. But where do we turn, when we go to pray? To whom do we address
o
ur prayers? We are a race that has outlived its gods. We are proud, I think, that we are beyond all superstition, that we live in a realm of the altogether tangible, the accurately measurable. But yet
—
yet
—
at a time like this
—”

They are staring at him inten
tly. Wondering where he
’
s heading, perhaps.

“
Marcus is dead, and no words will bring him back. Prayer itself, even if there were gods and the gods were listening to us, would not be capable of doing that. If there are gods, then it was the will of the gods
that Marcus be gathered to them, and we would have no choice but to bend to that will. And if, as we are all so confident, there are no gods
—”

He pauses. He looks from one to another to another, from Heinz to Huw to Paco, from Elizabeth to Noelle to Celes
te, looks at Leila, looks at Roy, Zena, seeking for signs of restlessness, puzzlement, irritation. But no. No. He has their attention completely. A good performance. The audience is his.

“
In ancient times,”
he goes on, “
this might have been easier for us. We would have said it was the will of the gods, or the will of some pa
r
ticular god, perhaps, that Marcus should die young in a strange and ho
s
tile place, and then we would have gone on about our work, secure in the knowl
edge that the workings of the gods are so mysterious that we need not seek explanations for them beyond the circular one that says that what has happened was fated to be. That was in a simpler era. We modern folk have dispensed with gods; we are left with
the problem of finding our own explanations, or of living without explanations entirely. I urge the latter choice on you.

“
Marcus
’
s death was an accident. It needs no explanation. There have always been risks in any venture of exploration, and, even though
most of the human race has forgotten that, we of all people should keep it constantly in mind. Courageously Marcus came out here to the stars with us to help in the task of finding a new home for the human race. Courageously he went down with Giovanna an
d
Huw to the surface of the world we see out there; and there he encountered a force too strong for him to understand or handle, and it destroyed him. So be it. The si
m
plest explanation is the best one here. Humanity is no longer, in general, a risk-taking
race. But we are the exceptions. We fifty human beings have chosen to revive the willingness to take risks that most of us have lost. Marcus is only the first victim of that willingness. He is gone, and we mourn his loss. We mourn that loss because he was
young, someone who had great contributions to make in the world we will someday build and who will not now make those contributions; and because he has been deprived of knowing the joy that the fulfillment of our mission u
l
timately will bring us; and becau
se he was one of us. Mainly, I think, we mourn him because he was one of us.

“
But is that a reason to mourn, really? He
still
is one of us. He always will be. As we go onward among the stars, to Planet B and Planet C and, if necessary, Planets X and Y and
Z and beyond, we will carry Marcus with us
—
the memory of Marcus
—
the first of our martyrs, the first to give his life in this great quest on which we all are bound. It was
nece
s
sary
for some of us to go down to the surface of that planet. Marcus went. Marcu
s died. He was performing his function as one of us, and he died because of it. Others of us, I very much suspect, will meet with similar fates as this voyage goes along. So be it. We willingly embraced all risks when we left home and friends and family a
n
d world behind to undertake this voyage across the universe. We gave up the assurance of a long and safe and comfortable life on Earth in return for the r
e
wards
—
and perils
—
of a venture such as no human beings have ever undertaken before. And as our work un
folds, we are not likely, any of us, to find it altogether comfortable, and certainly not very safe.

“
So Marcus is dead, much too soon. So be it. So be it. He is beyond all pain now, beyond all uncertainties and insufficiencies, all knowledge of failure an
d defeat, now. In that we should find comfort. But also we must see to it, friends
—
for our own sakes, not his
—
that Marcus
’
s death was not without purpose. We must go on, and on and on and on if need be, from one end of the cosmos to the other, if we must,
to find the world that we are to settle. And when we get there
—
and we
will
get there
—
we must see to it that our children and our children
’
s children remember always the name of Marcus, the first of the martyrs of our enterprise, who gave his life so that t
heir world could be. When we write the histories of our voyage, the name of Marcus will be written in letters of fire. We will make Marcus immortal that way. As all of us will be immortal
—
glorious figures of myth, demigods, even gods, perhaps
—
in the minds
of the people of that new world. We who are without gods to pray to ourselves will become gods, I think, to the settlers of the new Earth of the years to come. Immortal gods, all of us. And Marcus has simply entered his immortality earlier than the rest o
f
us, that
’
s all.”

Again he pauses. Looks from face to face. Too grand? he wonders. Too high-flown?

But everyone is utterly silent and still; everyone
’
s eyes are on him, even the blind eyes of Noelle. He has captured them completely. As in the old days, the
Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. The catharsis achieved, the purgation. Yes. A successful performance, one of his best. Perhaps even accomplishing something useful.

Good. Quit while you
’
re ahead, he thinks.

He says in a different tone of voice, a sudden dow
nward shift of rh
e
torical intensity, “
One thing more, and then we
’
ll break this up. This afternoon we
’
ll begin calculating the course for our next shunt, which will take us
—
what is it, Hesper, eighty light-years? Ninety?
—
to another possible colony-world. A
ctual departure time will be announced later. Naturally, I have no idea whether this second destination is going to work out any better than the first one did. We
’
re simply going to go out there and have a look, just as we did here. At this point we have
n
o pa
r
ticular expectations, one way or the other. Of course I hope that it
’
s the world we
’
re seeking, and I know you all feel the same way. But there are others waiting to be explored beyond that one, if need be, and, if need be, we will go onward until we
find what we want. I thank you all for listening. Meeting dismissed.”

***

Paco, Hesper, Julia, Sieglinde, Roy, and Heinz begin the process of working out the course that will take the
Wotan
to Planet B. The year-captain goes off with Noelle to send the com
munique to Earth that will report on the failure of the mission to Planet A and the death of Marcus.

He is worried about the effect that such news will have on the people of Earth. The people of Earth are accustomed to success. For them, he thinks, this vo
yage is a sort of fairy-tale adventure, and fairy tales are supposed to have benign outcomes, even though the occasional wicked witch may be met with along the way. The fact that one of the adventu
r
ers has actually
died
from his encounter with some dark ma
gical force may not fit the pattern that they expect to be enacted out here. They may insulate themselves from further jolts, he fears, by retreating from their interest in the
Wotan
’
s voyage, by decoupling themselves entirely from their involvement in the
enterprise.

Still, they have to be told. It would be wrong to withhold the truth from them. They know that a planetary landing has been made; they must be allowed to know the outcome of it.

“
How is transmission quality today?”
he asks Noelle.

“
Some interf
erence. Not too serious.”

“
All right, then. Are you ready to go?”

“
Whenever you are.”

He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while b
e
fore. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of u
n
broken gloom.
Abortive miss
ion…
severe and inexplicable zones of ps
y
chic disturbance everywhere…
violent irrational reactions by landing personnel…
deplorable fatal accident…
immediate withdrawal from planetary surface…
abandonment of exploration effort…
It
’
s all true, but it sounds terr
ible. He tries to soften it a little, improvising as he reads, inserting little phrases like “
hopeful first attempt”
and “
encouraging to have found so Earthlike a planet, whatever its drawbacks, so quickly.”
He speaks of their coming departure for Planet
B
and his optimistic sense that the galaxy is so replete with worlds of the appropriate size, temperature range, and atmosphere that there can be hardly any doubt at all of the forthcoming discovery of an adequate planet for settlement.