by Sue Burke
I started immediately, making mental notes and recording them with my feed:
Arrival means awakening to illness and worry. It begins with the indignities of a life support machine and anxieties over whether we have arrived as planned at the planet Pax.
I lay in a close-fitting capsule, and a recording of a soothing male voice instructed me to push the green button to open the door. The voice explained how to deal with straps and needles and tubes. I remembered reviewing the recording before we left, secretly harboring a hundred fears. But as the chairman of the task force, I dared show no anxiety on Earth and especially now, at that moment, wherever we were.
I opened the capsule and saw that I was alone—no, another capsule down the row opened and the soldier in it rose into the weightlessness of the chamber. I barely saw his bulk in the dim light as he methodically removed his connections. I began to remove mine, not willing to be outdone by that bioengineered simpleton. He noticed me.
“Chairman, sir! Chairman … Bachchan. Captain Aldo Haus reporting for duty, sir!” Then he laughed heartily and looked in a bag next to his capsule for supplies. He was an archetype.
I had objected to the presence on our team of someone sworn to belligerence—and in addition, even more strenuously, to the last-minute inclusion of the government observer. Our mission was science, not conquest or punitive politics, I had said. My objections were imperiously ignored.
I felt both ravenous and nauseated, noting that beard, hair, and nails had grown, evidence of about two months’ biological time. I remembered a small bottle of water with electrolytes next to the bag of clothing. It tasted vile, and my stomach tensed. I was going to throw up, and in weightlessness, floating vomit would mortify me and make others sick. And that would only make me feel sicker and … At this spiral of thought, my feed interrupted with an anxiety cycle inhibitor from the central network. The wild speculations stopped and I relaxed. I took another sip. The water still tasted vile and chemical, but I managed.
I looked up to see Haus.
“Do you need help, sir?” His square, lined face seemed sincere. “I think we can leave the skin suits on until we are sure we have arrived. But they stink, don’t they?” He laughed again. “Here, your oxygen mask, before we leave. And your flashlight.” As if I were an idiot.
The chamber rested inside heavy plating and a water tank to protect us from radiation. He hefted open the portal and we floated out and down—up?—a dark passageway. He inspected as we went and seemed to find nothing wrong, shoved open the hatch to the forward control room, and hit a switch.
“You first, sir! Let’s see where we are.”
I could not fathom his mix of deference and exuberance. Had we arrived? If the computer had erred, even if we could determine where we really were, we might not have enough fuel to reach the correct planet and eventually return to Earth. An error could be the end of all our hopes and plans.… But duty called. I entered the tiny room lined with equipment. In the little window, a sphere floated: blue, swirling with clouds, a twin of Earth, and it could be only one planet.
“We’re here,” I murmured. “We’re at Pax.”
He entered behind me and whooped in primitive joy. I stared at the planet’s beauty, hot tears trembling on my cheeks. But I made no notes about my loss of emotional control. The “me” of the book was not the “me” of reality.
I punched a button to send a message to Earth and quickly returned to the capsules to awaken our physician. I was revived first not merely because I led the mission but because I was deemed expendable compared to specialists—as expendable as a mere soldier, in fact—an estimation I was determined to change. Together we woke the rest, a biologically messy process that proceeded only slightly better than our worst-case scenario. At least no one had died. The very next day, biological issues under control, we started to work—and the problem with Pollux, the government observer assigned to us last-minute, began to emerge.
The botanist Mirlo and a data specialist were calibrating a sensor to detect vegetation. Mirlo planned to check for both visual-spectrum and near-infrared light. Pollux floated up behind them. Mirlo’s grimace was reflected on the face of a panel. Pollux had already irritated most people with niggling interference.
“You don’t need to do either,” Pollux said. “Just look out the window. The planet is plenty green.”
Mirlo was young, blond, and ruddy: a Gallic phenotype. He took a deep breath. “We’re measuring intensity. If we assume those are plants and they use something that functions like chlorophyll, they’ll absorb certain wavelengths.”
“Right. They’re green.”
Mirlo’s piercingly blue eyes became stern. “Yes,” he said slowly, “we can see that, but infrared will show their temperature. If they’re like Earth, they need water to function, and infrared shows their heat, and if they’re moist, they’ll be cooler. That way we can compare both measurements and see how much is likely to really be vegetation.”
Pollux exhibited the sallowness of a naturally tawny person who had spent a long sedentary life indoors, making his dark eyes and eyebrows all the more prominent. “You’re here to look for people, not plants,” he said. Then he looked Mirlo in the face with a sneer. “I don’t mean to offend you, but we have a mission. Botany isn’t central to it.”
Mirlo remained still as stone. As chairman, I needed to defend him. With a gentle push, I drifted over to an instrument panel now crowded with floating bodies.
“We have a protocol, and we’re going to follow it,” I said.
Pollux turned and the sneer grew. “You don’t have time to waste. How much oxygen do you think you have? If you don’t look for the colony right away, you’ll fail. We must return to Earth soon.”
Everyone was watching. I opened my mouth to respond, to explain that step one was a bottom-up examination of the planet, and step two, a search for anomalies that suggested organized life, all with timelines, but he spoke first.
“I’ve headed missions before.” His tone of voice lacked all respect. “Have you?”
I simply turned away. Senseless arguments couldn’t be won, and I would diminish my leadership to engage in them. In addition, I was trembling, anxious, close to panic. I hadn’t had a panic attack since I was a young man.
But he was lying. He hadn’t led a mission. Even in the rush before we left, I had found time to glance at his professional history and was appalled. He had been one of NVA’s jailers. Although I dared not say so—no one ever did—I abhorred the NVA institution for its systematic cruelty, its obvious lies, and its naked social control. A liar and a torturer: the worst possible person for this mission.
The day passed, and Mirlo discovered that indeed the planet hosted massive vegetation, surpassing Earth.
The next day, another problem with Pollux. We all had to exercise to recover lost muscle and bone mass from hibernation and weightlessness. I invested the required two hours per day on treadmills, bicycles, and resistance equipment as a duty, not a pleasure, and those first few days were particularly exhausting, even with the machines set at their lowest level.
Everyone was scheduled for their time, monitored by the computing system and overseen by the physician. That did not satisfy Pollux.
“Have you exercised?” he asked one of the technicians. Her feed was open, so I could follow the encounter although I was elsewhere. She merely nodded and continued checking equipment in the storage area, preparing it to be taken planetside.
He edged between her and the readouts. “Only one hour so far.”
“I know.” She possessed an inquisitive, calm personality and an angular, athletic build. “I’ll do the other as soon as I’m done here.”
“But you’ll land and collapse, and you don’t know what’s down there.”
“We won’t land soon, and by then we’ll know more. We thought all this through and created protocols.”
“For an Earthlike planet.”
“Which this is,” she said. During t
raining, her assertive character, so unfeminine, had surprised me.
“No, it’s not. Gravity is twenty percent more.”
“Yes. The air pressure is higher. Our blood volume is lower in space, which will cause immediate problems when we land unless we remediate it, so we will. Our suits will help us, too.”
I forced myself to intervene again, pushing off to go float inside the doorway of the storage area. “Pollux, we’ve thought about all that.”
He turned and looked at me. “You’re not taking this seriously. We won’t get back to Earth. You aren’t fit to lead.”
He shoved me aside and left. People stared at him and me. I wanted to fly after him and punch him, or to lock myself in the closest thing we had to a closet so I could tremble in secret. Both would be bad leadership. I should have intervened earlier, but I hadn’t thought he would go so far so very fast. I had a personnel problem that threatened to undermine my stature.
I asked my feed to give me another anxiety inhibitor, then, while I marched on a treadmill, I looked closer at his history. It did not report misconduct. In fact, it reported no conduct—good, bad, or indifferent—which meant redaction. Which meant he must have conducted himself badly. Perhaps someone had done him the “favor” of assigning him to this mission to escape disciplinary action.
Or perhaps it meant something worse, I realized to my utter consternation. Long ago as a graduate student, I had researched a voyage embarked upon by Spanish conquistadors down the Amazon River in search of El Dorado. The travelers did not know that the purpose of the trip had been to gather together the most undesirable conquistadors—a ghastly lot, most notably Lope de Aguirre—beneath an incompetent captain and ship them off to the unexplored jungle, never to be heard from again. Most succumbed to malnutrition, mutiny, murder, and madness.
I knew from the beginning that, like myself, some members had left Earth with desperate hopes that home would be different when we returned after more than two centuries away—in a word, Earth would be free. We were undesirables, united by an unspoken secret. Now we had the enemy at our elbow, incompetence inserted at the last moment trying to impose himself—so we would fail and never be heard from again.
That possibility could have been paranoia on my part, but I had a duty to stop him by whatever means I could command. I would save this mission.
Meanwhile, our work progressed.
Earthlike first appearances create misguided expectations, and our examinations over the coming days reveal subtleties: an older planet than Earth with greater mass and gravity, shorter days and longer years, more distant from a brighter sun. Intense life fills every corner.
We debate a babble of possibilities as we anxiously search for our colony. Small continents, some linked by land bridges, lie in sapphire oceans. For a week our scans are strewn with false alarms of humanity until a heat signature in the southern hemisphere identifies a small town, astoundingly bright and busy even in winter. We rejoice. Soon we have identified a settlement with colorful round roofs surrounded by well-tended fields. We estimate hundreds of residents in addition to domesticated animals.
We have found humanity’s frontier, and three weeks after arrival we prepare to resume contact. More study would be welcome. In fact, we are overwhelmed by data, but we are cramped and have a limited supply of food and air, which we must replenish on the planet. We do not know how we will be received, but we must go meet the natives.
I wondered about including more details, the way Death Downstream by J. P. Rashid recorded minute preparations for his trip down the Mississippi River during the Great Loss. The tale of our suffering in that overpacked vessel and its toll would have been equally moving. And damning for Pollux and his attempts to destroy morale and perhaps the mission itself, worthy of a full chapter detailing incidents, insults, and impositions.
“We have to go back to Earth.” He said this too often: it marked a clue to his thoughts. His only goal was to return as fast as possible, overriding any interest in science or exploration. He had come under duress. Worse yet, he threatened to dismiss me, quoting rules by section and paragraph. I checked the mission charter, and unknown to me, it had been changed when he was added to give the government observer rights to assert control. I was chairman, but he was prosecutor, judge, and successor.
Our mission had been sabotaged, deliberately and thoroughly.
I couldn’t let that happen. In addition to my administrative skills as a chairman—planning, fostering teamwork, coordinating activities toward a shared goal, aiding members to contribute their best—in academia I had navigated both scholarly and bureaucratic waters whirlpooled with infighting, character assassination, and rival personalities and camps. I had observed masters at the art of office-milieu politics, participating as needed. And still, a misstep had once brought me close to incarceration, so harshly were iconoclastic opinions judged. Dissidents at any level of society might even quietly, permanently, disappear.
I knew what to do and how to step lightly, and in the process, I could enhance my respect among mission members.
The anthropologist from the Kingdom of Kongo, a voluble woman, was reviewing the original Pax settler list in the kitchen module as she sipped dulse-seaweed “soup,” our staple food. I entered ostensibly to fetch fortified water and asked her if she had ever encountered Pollux before. “He’s an anthropologist by training.”
She frowned at the mention of his name and shook her head, her tight black braids waving gracefully in the weightlessness. “I’ve never understood why people study one thing and do another.”
“He used it in penal work. Pollux was an NVA jailer.”
Her eyes snapped open wide. And I heard a gasp behind me. Karola floated in the doorway. The two stared at me for a long moment.
I said, “Women tend not to like NVA.”
Karola held herself so still she had to be concealing something deeply felt.
“She could be any of us,” the anthropologist said, her voice tight.
“That’s the point,” I said, as close as I could get to condemning the institution without losing apparent neutrality. I had seen which side they would cheer for.
I added as lightly as I could, “He’s functionally blind, too. I don’t know what that will mean on the planet’s surface. There won’t be any fixed-camera feeds there to compensate, and a local network won’t be in place.” Thus I undercut his competence.
That done, I changed the subject and asked the anthropologist about the original settlers, all three of us exchanged a few Globish sentences for practice, and finally I left them to ponder the news. I had handled that well, I thought. I knew they would spread what they had learned to trusted friends, so soon everyone would know. When I defeated him on Pax, I would be a giant-slayer.
We hoped Earth had changed, and information was occasionally broadcast toward us, though it had to traverse a fifty-eight-light-year journey. The last message had been automatically intercepted two decades earlier, and there had been no change.
“What’s happening on Earth?” Mirlo asked at a biology planning meeting.
“There’s no reason to know,” Pollux said. He was not welcome at that meeting, but the ship’s size precluded privacy. “You should worry about what’s happening here, or we won’t get back to Earth.”
“We’re all fulfilling our duties,” I said.
“Duties?” He was suddenly shouting and pointing at me. “If you call loafing a duty. You let people eat what they want when they want and work as little as possible. If people put in just one more hour per day—”
“We’d be where we are now. Please, let us continue with our work.”
“We need to decide who should run this mission.” With that, he floated away.
“The rules give him the right to remove me and take control,” I said to the members around me. “They were changed to accommodate his presence.”
The members exchanged looks. They now understood the urgency of the battle I was about to undert
ake for them.
All our radio hails to the planet went unanswered, although surely they would have maintained such basic, essential, universal technology. We continued to broadcast until the moment came to leave. Twenty of the thirty members of the team would travel to the surface, while ten would remain in orbit to maintain the ship and record the information we transmitted. Two heli-planes would carry us down while a third stayed behind for rescue purposes if necessary.
We disguised our fear as excitement. I had already guessed that Pollux’s anger hid fear. On the surface, who knew what terrors we might find? But if he stayed behind, he could order the ship to abandon us and return to Earth—unlikely, but possible, and I had to prevent it. I asked the physician if Pollux was well. By the rules, I had access to medical records only in emergencies.
“Excessive anxiety. He’s not stable.”
I hid my joy. “Is he being treated?”
“No. You self-regulate, and you’re doing fine. I suggested it to him and he refused.”
We were silent a moment. Fear was weakness. I could exploit it only if I was less afraid than him.
“You could order treatment,” the physician said.
“And he would depose me, take over, and refuse again.”
“He’s going to be trouble.”
“I’ll ask him to stay behind.”
I knew Pollux would oppose any idea from me. I found him sweating on the treadmill. “Perhaps,” I said, “you’d be more comfortable staying behind.”
He reacted more strongly than I had expected: jumping off the treadmill without disconnecting the elastic cords. He was sprung into the air.
“No! I have a job to do.” He waved his arms to find a handhold and control his writhing trajectory. “Down there—who knows what you’d do down there? You have no idea of what to expect and you’re unprepared.”