Starborne (26 page)

Huw checks his own internal weather. It
’
s still stormy. For as much time as he is in motion, taking charge of things and behaving like the strong, efficient leader that he is, he seems able to fight the panic away. But the moment he stops moving, i
t threatens to break through his d
e
fenses again.

Being close to the other two helps, a little. Each one now is aware that the disturbance is a general one, that all three of them are affected in the same basic way. So long as they stand here holding hands,
some kind of current of reassurance is passing between them, providing a little extra measure of strength that can be used in resisting the sweeping waves of pure unmotivated fear that continue relentlessly to attack them.

“
What
’
s it like for you?”
Huw as
ks.

Marcus can
’
t seem to utter articulate speech. He makes a ghastly li
t
tle stammering sound and trails off into silence. But Giovanna is in be
t
ter shape, apparently. “
It
’
s like everything I was ever afraid of when I was a girl, all rolled into one big hor
ror. The nightmares that won
’
t stop even after they wake me up. The eye that opens in the wall and stares at me. The insects with huge snapping jaws coming out of the closet. The snakes at the bottom of my bed.”

“
It started to hit you inside the drone?”

“
A
s soon as we landed, yes. But it
’
s worse out here. A lot worse. Are you getting hit with the same stuff?”

“
Yes,”
Huw says distantly. “
Pretty much the same.”

Pretty much, yes. Teeth itching, tingling, seemingly expanding until they fill his mouth. A throbbi
ng in his groin, and not the good kind of throbbing. Jagged blocks of ice moving about in his belly. And always that steady pounding of dread, dread, dread. A relentless neural di
s
charge activating the terror-synapses that he had not even known he owned.

N
o wonder there don
’
t seem to be any higher life-forms on this pla
n
et. Animal evolution has met its match here. Any nervous system co
m
plicated enough to operate the various homeostatic processes that are involved in upper-phylum life is too complicated to w
ithstand this co
n
stant barrage of fear and trembling. No neural hookup more elaborate than those of bugs and worms can put up with it for long without giving way.

“
What do you think it is?”
Giovanna asks. “
And what are we going to do?”

“
I don
’
t know and I
don
’
t know,”
he tells her.

Then, addressing himself to the
Wotan
, he says, “
We
’
re having a li
t
tle problem down here. We
’
ve all come out of the probe ship and we find that we seem to be suffering from some sort of a collective psych
o
logical breakdown. No re
ason for it apparent. It
’
s just happening. Has been since the moment of touchdown. As though this place is
—”

From Marcus, suddenly, comes a dismal retching sound.

“—
haunted in some way,”
Huw finishes.

Marcus has pulled free of them and is clawing at the he
lmet of his suit. Before Huw can do anything, Marcus has his faceplate open and he is breathing the unfiltered air of this alien world, the first human being ever to do such a thing. He is, in fact, vomiting into the air of this alien world, which is why
h
e has opened his faceplate in the first place. Huw watches helplessly as Marcus doubles over in the most violent attack of nausea Huw has ever seen. Marcus falls to his knees, quivering convu
l
sively. Hugs his belly, spews up spurts of thin fluid in what se
ems like an endless racking process.

Marcus is not a pretty sight as he does this but he is, at the very least, providing a useful test of the effects of the atmosphere of Planet A on human lungs, which is something that they would have had to carry out so
oner or later during the course of this landing anyway. And the effect so far is neutral, which is to say that Marcus does not appear to be su
f
fering any obvious damage from breathing the stuff. Of course, he may be in such a state of desperate psychic dis
array by now that a little lung corrosion would seem like only an incidental distraction.

Eventually Marcus straightens up. He looks numbed and addled but fractionally calmer than before, as though that wild eruption of regurg
i
tation has steadied him a lit
tle.

“
Well?”
Huw says, perhaps too roughly. “
Feel better now?”

Marcus does not reply.

“
Give us a report on the atmosphere, at least. Now that you
’
re breathing the stuff, tell us what it
’
s like.”

Marcus
stares at him, glassy-eyed. Lips moving, after a moment. Speech centers not quite in gear.

“
I
—
I
—”

No good. He
’
s all but unhinged.

Huw, strangely, finds that he has grown almost accustomed to the panic effect by this time. He doesn
’
t like it
—
he hates it, a
ctually
—
but now that he has come to understand that it is not a function of some sudden character disintegration of his own, but seems, rather, to be e
n
demic to this miserable place, he is able to encapsulate and negate the worst of its effects. His flesh
continues to crawl, yes, and cold bony fi
n
gers are still playing along the stem of his medulla oblongata, and u
n
happy intestinal maneuvers seem distressingly close to occurring. But there is work to do here, tests to be carried out, things to investigate,
and Huw focuses on that with beneficial effect.

He says, speaking as much to his listeners aboard the
Wotan
as to Giovanna and the hapless Marcus, “
There are a lot of possibilities. One is that this place is inhabited by sentient life-forms that we aren
’
t
able to detect, and they
’
re beaming some kind of mind-scrambling ray at us that
’
s doing this to us. Pretty far-fetched, but at this point we can
’
t rule anything out. Another thought is that it
’
s the planet itself, radiating ps
y
chic garbage at us right out
of the ground, a kind of mental radioactivity. Which is likewise on the improbable side, I admit. But both of those ideas, crazy as they sound, seem more acceptable to me than my third notion, which is that human beings come equipped with some kind of inh
e
rent terror syndrome that goes into operation when we arrive at a habitable planet that isn
’
t Earth, almost a sort of wizard
’
s spell, but one that was hard-wired into our nervous systems somewhere during the evolutionary process to prevent us, God only kn
o
ws why, from settling on some other
—
Marcus! Damn you, Marcus, come back!”

Marcus has fled right in the middle of Huw
’
s windy hypothesizing, and is running, now
—
not lurching, not staggering, but
running
, as fast as his legs will take him
—
across the rough pa
rched landscape of the landing zone.

“
Shit,”
Huw mutters, and sets out after him.

Marcus is heading up the sloping side of the basin in which they have landed. He moves with lunatic fastidiousness around the borders of the elliptical groves of yellow-heade
d bushes, running in figure-eight pa
t
terns past them, up one and down the next, as he ascends the shallow rise. Huw ponderously gives pursuit. Marcus is young, long-limbed, and slender; Huw is fifteen years older and constructed in quite the opposite way,
and high-speed running has never been one of his pastimes. Ru
n
ning seems to intensify the disagreeable quality of this place, too: each pounding step sends a jolt of electric despair up the side of Huw
’
s leg on a direct route to his brain. He has never exp
erienced such raggedness of spirit before. It is a great temptation to give over the chase and drop down in a fetal crouch and sob like a baby.

But Huw runs onward, anyway. He knows that he needs to get a grip on Marcus, since Marcus seems incapable of get
ting a grip on himself, and put him back on board the probe before he does some real harm to himself as he sprints around this desert.

Marcus is moving, though, as if he plans to cover half a continent or so before pausing for breath, and Huw very quickly
finds himself win
d
ed and dizzy, with a savage stitch in his side and a sensation of growing lameness in his left leg. And the terror quotient has begun to rise again, back to the levels he was experiencing right after leaving the probe. He can force himsel
f to run, or he can fight off the demonic psychic radi
a
tion of this place, but it seems that he can
’
t do both at once.

He pulls up short, midway up the slope, gasping in hoarse noisy spasms and close to tears for the first time in his adult life. Marcus ha
s vanished over the rim of the basin, losing himself among the black c
o
rona of fiercely fanged lunar-looking rocks that forms its upper bound
a
ry.

Giovanna, bless her, comes jogging up next to him as he stands there swaying and quivering.

“
Did you see which
way he went?”
she asks.

Huw, pulling himself together with one more huge expenditure of effort, points toward the rim above them. “
Somewhere up there. Into that tangle of pointy formations.”

She nods. “
And are you all right?”

“
I
’
m fine. I
’
m absolutely won
derful. Let
’
s go up there and find him.”

They hold hands as they scramble up the rise. There is, once again, some benefit conferred by actual physical contact, even through their heavy gloves. Huw sets a slower pace than before: he is getting troubl
e
some m
essages from his chest, now, that indicate it would be a smart idea not to try to do any more running for the time being. The slope of the basin is not quite as shallow as it had seemed from the landing site. And the ground is rough, very rough, unexpecte
d
little sandy pits ev
e
rywhere and nasty tangles of flat wiry vines and a tiresome number of sharp loose rocks in just the places where you would prefer to place your foot.

But eventually they get to the top. On the far side there is a fairly steep descent
to a sprawling valley pockmarked with more of the yellow bushes, which grow in the same elliptical grove. Here, too, each grove is bizarrely set with mathematical precision at identical distances from all of its neighbors. Some tall, ugly, sparse-leaved t
r
ees are visible beyond them, and in the hazy region farther out there seems to be a completely flat savannah that runs clear to the horizon.

At first there is no sign of Marcus.

Then Giovanna sucks in her breath sharply, and points. Huw follows the line of
her arm down the hill. Marcus. Yes.

***

Marcus is lying about a hundred meters downslope from them, face down, his arms wrapped around a flat-faced rectangular boulder as though he is hugging it. From the angle that Marcus
’
s head makes against his shoulde
rs, Huw knows that the news is not going to be good, but all the same he feels obliged to get himself down to him just as fast as his aching legs and overtaxed heart will permit. The anxiety that he feels now is of an entirely different quality from the o
n
e with which this planet has been filling his mind for the past couple of hours.