Starborne (24 page)

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 an
y
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
w
ill 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 almos
t
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 circu
m
stances at this stage in the voyage are Hesper and Paco an
d 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
t
hey 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 e
v
er to
be demand for the skills of the others on board, the gene-bank o
p
erators 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 salv
a
tion, Noelle. I would never place you at risk, never. Never.

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

The interferen
ce effect has been coming and going, lately. The fr
e
quency 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 coul
d 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 e
x
plains. “
Never mind. Just tell them that we
’
re sending three of our pe
o
ple 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
W
o
tan
’
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 hol
d a crew of three or four people, and is intended for follow-up expeditions precisely of this sort. It is d
e
fault-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 n
ow, after three days of programming and simulations and r
e
checks, 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 si
x
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 bee
n
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; b
u
t that is the kind of thing that becomes apparent only after the fact.

The spacesuit-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 in
her
cabin like brooding Achilles.
Huw leads the way, waving majestically to the a
s
sembled 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, nex
t 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 tiny 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 o
f
their a
c
celeration chairs. It is astonishing how big the planet looks as they near it. It is only an Earth-sized 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 a
n
other 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. Th
e intell
i
gence knows how such things are done and its reaction time is a tho
u
sand 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 f
our desert-like 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 le
v
els. Huw is planning a trek to the ocean shore to try to get a reading on what s
ort 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 not
h
i
ng 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 flatte
n
ed, 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 y
ear-captain, sitting up there 20,000 kil
o
meters 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 coll
i
sion, s
et 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 a
r
rayed here and there around the sides of this sloping basin; they have peculiar jet-black corkscrew-twist trunks and oddly jutti
ng branches, and they too seem very thoroughly otherworldly. Even the way they are situated is strange, for they grow in long tight elliptical rings, perhaps a hundred bushes to each ring, and each ring spaced in remarkable equ
i
distance 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 non-specific wrongness. They a
n
nounce, however subtly, that they have undergone processes of fo
r
mation and erosion that are not quite the same as the rocks of Earth have experienced.

It is understood that H
uw 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. D
e
termination and r
ecording 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
s
o 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 disqui
e
tude and agitation are utterly foreign. He is generally prudent and ci
r
cumspect, useful traits in one who finds his greatest pleasure in entering unfamiliar and dangerous places, but a tendency to
ward 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 sto
m
ach, and a curious lump has appeared in his throat that make
s swallo
w
ing difficult, and he has read that these feelings are symptoms of anxi
e
ty, 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.