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 rough-skinned wings clamping remorselessly down over his head to cut off his intake of air. He simply says, “I’ve come a long distance to get here. I want to breathe the air of another world before I leave.”
“And if breathing it is dangerous?”
“Marcus was breathing it,” Huw says. “It’s just air. Oxygen and nitrogen and CO2and 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 again. His sampling of the atmosphere 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 cheery 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 below 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 her 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 random 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 techniques 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 occasion 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 postmission quarantine, after a thorough checkout to ascertain whether they have picked up potentially troublesome alien microorganisms down below.
“I can’t say that we wouldn’tever get used to them,” he tells the year-captain. “How could I know that? In five hundred years, a thousand, we might come to love them. We might miss all that stomach-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 setting 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 isthere, for whatever reason, and it makes your flesh crawl. Mademy 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 youwant 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 inflections 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 deeply. The planet itself seems to be the problem. The planet must be intolerable.
It is a matter of some regret to the year-captain that Planet A isn’t going to be suitable. He wants the expedition 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 place 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 reply 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 agriculture, 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 privately 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-hug. “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 little shy, generally uncommunicative. At no time had he been part of the contingent ofGo players, nor had he sought to establish any sort of regular 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 remain in the little 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 figured in any large way in the social life of the ship, that has stirred 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 reckon 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 traditions 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 from 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 expedition with one and only one man. That may be a problem, eventually. But the real problem is that the people of the Wotan had come to feel that they were living a life outside all mortality, 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.
It was Julia who suggested to the year-captain that a memorial service 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 altogether devastated. Bodies are self-healing these days, up to a point; minds, less so. Since the return of the landing party Leon has been dispensing psychoactive drugs to those in need of chemical therapy; Edmund, Alberto, Maria, and Noori, all of whom have some gift for counseling, are making their help 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 acknowledgment 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.
He finds it difficult, at first, to locate the proper words. It is not a matter of stage fright — he of all people wouldn’t worry about that — but rather of a sense of inadequacy, of fundamental awkwardness. The year-captain’s dispassionate 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. “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 our 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 intently. 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 Celeste, looks at Leila, looks at Roy, Zena, seeking for signs of restlessness, puzzlement, irritation. But no. No. He has their attention completely.
“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 particular god, perhaps, that Marcus should die young in a strange and hostile place, and then we would have gone on about our work, secure in the knowledge 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 and 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 simplest 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 ultimately will bring us; and because 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? Hestill 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 wasnecessary for some of us to go down to the surface of that planet. Marcus went. Marcus 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 and 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 rewards — and perils — of a venture such as no human beings have ever undertaken before. And as our work unfolds, 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 and 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 wewill 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 their 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 of 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. As in the old days, the Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. 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 downward shift of rhetorical 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. Actual 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 no particular 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 communiqué 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 voyage 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 adventurers has actuallydied from his encounter with some dark magical 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 interference. Not too serious.”
“All right, then. Are you ready to go?”