Starborne (36 page)

His ostensible reason for derailing the conversation
—
that t
hey need to concentrate instead on the challenge of Planet B
—
is legitimate enough. But behind it lies something else entirely, a matter of compa
s
sion, of concern for the most delicate member of the ship
’
s community. He could see, even if none of the others
could, the look of fear on N
o
elle
’
s face, and he could hear the little quaver in her voice. Suppose th
e
se angels, or whatever they are,
did
exist, and suppose she
could
in some fashion open her mind to them, how did anyone know what would b
e
come of her? H
is mind had gone at once to all those Greek myths of women who had wanted to be embraced by this or that god in all his might, and had been granted their wish, and had been consumed unto ashes by the full glory of the deity. They needed to consider, very
c
ar
e
fully indeed, all the consequences of a mental union between Noelle and one of these supposed creatures of the void, before shoving her into the attempt.

So the desire to protect Noelle lurks beneath his stated reason for t
a
bling the project. And becaus
e
—
he isn
’
t sure why
—
he is reluctant to reveal that underlying desire to the others, he has chosen to hide it b
e
hind an acceptable but secondary explanation that would achieve the same goal. That was a manipulative act, he feels.

The selfishness is hidden o
ne further layer down. What if Noelle tries to speak with these creatures, and succeeds, and actually strikes some detente with them under which the communications channel linking her to her sister could be reopened? What, then, would become of his own ha
r
d-won deal giving him the right to participate in the Planet B landing expedition in return for accepting a third year as captain? Many of them, he suspects, had voted for the change in the Articles of the Voyage only because they believed that contact wi
t
h Earth had been forever lost and they were under no obligation now to obey inconvenient regulations that Earth had imposed upon them. But if that contact were to be restored
—

He has put the “
angel”
thing aside, therefore, for three good and proper reasons
, one that is simply sensible, one that is tender-hearted, and one that is out-and-out selfish.

But the year-captain knows that the Abbot, if only he could be co
n
sulted in these matters, would focus on the third of those reasons, and would ask him whether
it was likely that the other two would have had much force in his mind if the third one had not been driving him; and there would be no good answer to that. There never were any good a
n
swers to the Abbot
’
s questions. He never condemned; he left that job to
you yourself; but he could never be fooled, either.

Alone in his cabin now, the year-captain closes his eyes and the fo
r
midable figure of the Abbot rises vividly in his mind: a small, compactly constructed man, a fleshless man, bone and muscle only, agele
ss, ind
e
fatigable. He was probably about a hundred years old but no one would have been greatly astonished had it been demonstrated that he was twice that age, or three times it, or that he had come into the world in the latter days of the Pleistocene. He
seemed indestructible. An unforgettable face, broad forehead, dense mat of curling dark hair, piercing violet eyes, firmly jutting nose, practically lipless mouth. No one knew his name. He was simply the Abbot. Had he founded the monastery? No one knew th
a
t, either. The residents of the monastery did not indulge in historical research. They were there; so was he; he was the Abbot. B
e
yond that, very little mattered.

The year-captain revered him. In the hour before dawn, when he would arise and go down to the
icy shore for the first of the day
’
s rituals of discipline, he would always find the Abbot already there, kneeling by the water
’
s edge, holding his hands beneath the surface. Not to mortify the flesh, not to incur the sin of pride by demonstrating how mu
c
h self-inflicted damage he could tolerate, but simply to focus his conce
n
tration, to clarify the operations of his mind. All of the Lofoten exercises were like that. One performed them for their own sake, and not to co
n
vince others or even yourself of your
great holiness. Holiness was beside the point here; the monastery, in this entirely secular age, was entirely secular in its orientation.

The year-captain relives, for the moment, those Lofoten days. The jagged chain of bleak rocky islands, rising like th
e spines of some su
b
merged dinosaur
’
s enormous back from the sea off Norway
’
s fjord-sundered northwest coast. A stark landscape, here. The dark stormy Vestfjord that separated them from the mainland. The white-covered alpine peaks towering steeply in the b
ackground, a wall of wrinkled granite. The sparse grassy patches; the sodden cranberry moors; the broad ominous breast of the Atlantic curving off toward the west. Once these had been fishing islands, but the swarms of silvery cod were long extinct, and s
o
were the fishing villages that had harvested the abundant catch. Mostly the islands were empty now, except for the one where the monastery sat, a neat row of stone buildings a short way i
n
land from the sea.

The Gulf Stream flows here; the climate is harsh
but not as extreme as the Arctic location might suggest. After Ganymede and Io and Ca
l
listo and Titan, these Lofoten islands might seem almost like paradise. There are no cranberry bogs on Ganymede. There are no grassy patches. One would derive no spiritu
al benefit from thrusting one
’
s bare hands into the waters of one of Titan
’
s hydrocarbon lakes, only a quick death. It was after his final excursion to the moons of Saturn that he had e
n
tered the monastery, leaving Huw to reap the glory of their exploit al
l alone. Returning from Saturn, he had felt a need to
—
was it to flee the society of his fellow humans? No, not flee, exactly, but certainly to withdraw from it, to go to some quiet place where he could reflect on the things he had seen and learned, the pr
e
valence of living things in places like Titan and Io, the stubbornness of the life-force in the face of the most hostile of surroundings. What, if anything, did that stubbor
n
ness mean? What kind of ticking mechanism was this universe, and what forces had s
et it going? He didn
’
t really expect answers to those questions; he wasn
’
t entirely sure that answers were what he was really looking for. He wanted simply to ask the questions over and over again, and to discover, perhaps, some pattern of meaning that
con
nected
, rather than “
answered,”
them. Lofoten was there and available to him; Lofoten was suddenly irresistible. So it was to Lofoten he went
—
he was Sca
n
dinavian himself, and had always known of the place; going there was like coming home, only more so
—
and
it was on Lofoten that he stayed, going down to the icy sea to clarify his mind by numbing his hands, u
n
til at last the enterprise of the starship beckoned to him and he knew that he had to move on.

The Abbot had known it even before he had. “
I have come
to request permission to leave,”
he had said, and the Abbot, smiling, a smile as cool and remote as the light of the farthest galaxies, had said, “
Yes, it is the time when you must carry us to the stars, is that not so?”

***

Huw says, “
We
’
ll go down and ta
ke a look at it, won
’
t we?”
And then, when the year-captain remains silent: “
Won
’
t we?”

The
Wotan
has made the shunt out of nospace successfully once again, and Julia has executed the appropriate braking maneuvers, and now the starship hangs in orbit a cou
ple of million kilometers above the surface of the second world of this nameless K-type sun
’
s solar system. For three days they have been studying the characteristics of that world via the ship
’
s instruments. Huw and the year-captain are looking at it now,
a furry gray-white sphere centered perfectly in the viewplate. A planet-shaped blanket of thick cloud, with a planet hiding behind it.

What kind of planet, though?

“
We have to go down and give it the old once-over, don
’
t you think?”
Huw asks. There is som
ething of a touch of desperation in his voice. The year-captain has been at his most opaque today, his inner feelings as thoroughly shrouded as the surface of that planet in the viewplate.

Once again Hesper
’
s long-range calculations have been miraculously confirmed by direct instrument scan. It has turned out to be the case that Planet B is somewhat larger in diameter than Earth but has very similar gravitation, and that its atmospheric composition is 22% ox
y
gen and 70.5% nitrogen and 4.5% water vapor, which is a lot, along with a hefty though not unmanageable 1.75% CO
2
and assorted minor quantities of methane and various inert gases. That suggests a steamy tropical cl
i
mate, and indeed the instrument scan has
revealed that the mean te
m
perature of this Planet B varies scarcely a degree from pole to pole: it is uniformly hot, a sweaty 45 degrees Celsius everywhere. A jungle world. Plenty of vegetation, photosynthesizing that lofty tonnage of CO
2
like cra
zy. The good old Mesozoic, waiting for them down there.

No visual evidence of cities or towns. No electromagnetic output anywhere along the spectrum from gammas up to the longest radio waves and beyond. Nobody home, apparently.

No oceans, no lakes, no rive
rs, either. A solid land mass from pole to pole. That
’
s odd, in view of the startlingly high proportion of water v
a
por in the atmosphere. All that H
2
O must condense and precipitate out occasionally, right? There should, in fact, be almost constant rainfall
on such a world. Where does that enormous quantity of rain go? Does it all evaporate right back into the cloud layer? Doesn
’
t it collect anywhere on the surface in the form of large bodies of water?

The sonar probe shows something even odder. The planet i
s a big ball of rock, extremely skimpy on heavy metals, maybe on metals of any sort. Most of it is just basalt. But the sonar indicates that this world is swaddled in a huge layer of something relatively soft that covers the e
n
tire surface, the
entire
surf
ace, not a break in it anywhere. Vegetable matter, evidently. A planetary jungle. Well, that
’
s congruent with the climatic and atmospheric figures. But this worldwide layer of vegetable stuff seems to be two or three hundred kilometers thick. That
’
s quite
a thickness. The tallest mountain on Earth is only about nine kilometers high. The idea that this planet is covered by a wrapping of jungle that has roots going down twenty times as deep as Mount Everest is tall is pretty hard to accept.

The people of the
Wotan
, in the main, are still basking in the warmth of their own expectations about Planet B that they have been nourishing all during the journey across nospace from the other solar system. For many months, now, they have been convinced that Planet B is t
he pot of gold at the end of their rainbow, and until they learn otherwise that is the attitude they are determined to maintain. But those few who have act
u
ally been looking at the direct data from Planet B have already unde
r
stood that those expectations a
re doomed to be dashed, and they are starting to wonder how their fellow voyagers are going to react to the extreme disappointment that they have set up for themselves.