Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  “If we go down, are we able subsequently to return out here?” Vils asked this immediately. Both descent and subsequent relaunch were normally part of a station’s capability. But Kayis had been through the meteoraid. And the planet was unknown, unknown that was in a way beyond all analysis of gravity, air, flora, or fauna. How dangerous was Jangala, and in what hidden fashion? “How tricky would the landing be? And the visit — what danger?” And he realized he asked this of Kayis as if he were pleased by the notion of a trip to the surface, where in fact he was apprehensive. All his unease had risen in him, from the moment they grew close enough to see its beauty. Jangala was like a stunning yet inimical woman — you desired to be near her, yet also wished to avoid her entirely. You knew she might catch you in her web, or only harm you by some passing scratch, by her unnoticed, but that would leave a scar for life.

  Kayis took quite a time to respond to his question.

  He decided it was computing, evaluating.

  Then Kayis said, “The station is impaired, Vilsev. It requires temporary grounding in order for overview and restoration, which is not properly possible in the orbital zone.”

  “Why have you never told me this before?”

  “The station’s condition has slightly worsened over time. Kayis did not wish to alarm you needlessly, when nothing could yet be done.”

  Vils stared at the view of Jangala below. He pondered how the human government of Arkann had not “needlessly alarmed” the planet’s population with news of the by-then unavoidable meteoraid.

  He said nothing.

  Kayis said: “I will ask again later, Vilsev, when you have weighed matters.”

  And Vils thought of a calculating, aging mother, coercing by her patience, indefatigable in her selfless, tolerant selfishness. And right, obviously. Always right.

  Kayis alighted without so much as a bump, just as day was melting into dusk.

  Descending, the crimson sun’s set had spread below like liquid paint, next risen above them, then sunk again below and away over the curve of the world.

  In the monitor screens Vils watched the hot color dissolve and the velvet gray-blue of first night infuse. They had landed northerly. It would be a prolonged twilight. Through the mechanical ears of the station macrophones there then began to come a sort of purring syncopation — like the grasshoppers he had heard in childhood and youth. But apparently it was not that. There were no evolved insects, no recognizable animals. It was instead the murmuring close-down of certain plants that diurnally stretched out their leaves like radar bowls, then shut them tight for the dark.

  Finally the whirring purr faded, and by then the sky was luminous indigo and scattered with stars in many shades. This closely resembled his memories too, though the tints seemed brighter, he thought, here; perhaps only some effect of the scanners. Then he heard the depth of silence, deep as a chasm, which gradually became orchestrated by the incoming solar tide of the axe-head sea.

  Kayis was again testing the atmosphere for toxins. Now immersed in it, the station could and must take very thorough and flawless readings. But by midnight all were benign. The night would last approximately 21 hours, the day less than 9. Yet this had not impaired the fertile growth and opulence of the jungle-forests and plains. The verdure had found means to capture solar heat and power. During the period of the nocturne, every inch of flora then processed what it had trapped and stored.

  That first night, when it had become true night, Vils dreamed of hollowed darkened chambers in which fiery wheels were spinning and spinning sunlight into gold.

  Remembering this dream, Vils felt healed.

  He felt remade, new again. Life was possible.

  Was it now safe to venture outside the station?

  Kayis, when Vils asked this question, was hesitant, if only in its mechanistic way. It said that there seemed to be no hostile elements outside. The atmosphere was if anything better than initially supposed. A stream ran nearby, going down toward the shore of the sea that lay only a quarter of a mile off; the stream water was drinkable and contained essential vitamins, these presumably leached from surrounding plants. (Kayis had already dispatched mechanical devices to test this.)

  Then surely there would be no problem in Vils stepping out? He was impatient himself now, a boy wanting to go fishing in his holidays.

  “It is better that you wait a little, Vilsev,” Kayis said.

  “Why? What’s the matter with this place? We’ve tested and checked it. You have landed us on it. Open the doors.” He was already suited up in one of the lighter protective garments and had included a breathing device for the unlikely contingency that something might go wrong with the clean and faultless air.

  Kayis said: “It may be that the minor erosions the station has recently suffered have somewhat impaired the checks it has run. There has seemed to be a 99% safety margin. But in fact —”

  “Open the doors.” Vils was no longer the urgent (pleading?) boy. He was angry, cold, and old. “Let me out,” he added, and heard the menace in his voice with yet another disagreeable shock.

  But Kayis now obeyed him. The locks and outer doors were being activated — if, it seemed to him, rather slowly.

  Vils strode from the deck, leapt down the ramp. He ran towards the station’s exit. God — God. He had never thought to leave this prison again —

  “Vilsev,” said Kayis.

  That was all.

  He heard the soft voice, now insubstantial — as he sprang toward the station’s hope of light. He took no notice.

  Kayis did not speak again.

  It had got cranky, the station. Its functions were indeed imperfect. Better break free, see what sanctuary was to be had out in the sunshine of this world. When the outer doors hissed wide, nevertheless he stood frozen on the threshold.

  Blinded by the glow of a natural day, he stared through a blur of tears into the green-blue sky, and all about the vast hands of the creeper-roped trees held out their black-green fingers, their leaves spread like fans and bowls, like gazing eyes and thirstily drinking mouths…. They made a faint intermittent trilling, suggestive of birdsong, just as in the dark they stored and spun and made the song of grasshoppers. Grasses dark as jade poured to a broad meadow of some tall and honey-colored grain that Kayis had told him might be harvested and ground for bread. Flowers like giant lilies, pink and bronze, slowly peeled back their petals in an ecstasy of solar absorption, then slowly coiled them shut. Open and shut and open, on and on, each process taking one minute. The air was like vintage champagne. It made him drunk, full of bubbles of oxygen and the alcoholic scent of organic life.

  It was nearly half an hour before he moved to jump down into the rustling silken grass. He went forward, stumbling slightly, stopping here and there — a statue again — resuming. The stream flexed like a rope of diamonds. And beyond the meadow the land sloped to the bay, and the green-turquoise of the sea was rippling and swimming north to south now the tide was momentarily stable. It sounded, the sea, even as it had through the macrophones, like all tidal waters — like breathing, or sighs, human, alive. A fellow creature.

  He did not return to the station for hours.

  At last a little crab-like machine came scrambling down the slope behind him, onto the beach of jacinth stones.

  “You must come back for health checks,” said the machine, in its own gravelly chatter.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “You must come b —”

  Leaning over he switched it off.

  Then he sat on, watching the muscular running of the sea, and the little machinelet sat quietly by him, like a loyal dog.

  Kayis, the demanding mother — or worse, the jealous wife — waited a quarter mile behind, nursing her wrongs.

  Vils laughed aloud at his childish imagination.

  He did not return until hunger came to his notice. By then the bright young sun had gone below the zenith. The sky was thickening to the exact color in a peacock’s-eye feather.

 
Back “home,” the lock checked him over; nothing was amiss. He sloughed his protective garment — this too gave no evidence of anything untoward. The little searching machine was taken apart, found unimpaired, and put back together again.

  Inside the station, the artificial lights struck him as deadly dulled. One corridor lamp was flickering. The shower water seemed too hot.

  When Kayis communicated with him, as ever there was no expression, let alone acrimony, in its dehumanized voice.

  That night Vils dreamed and afterwards remembered the dream vividly:

  While he was sleeping on his bunk, the new planet had come in through the metal walls of the station’s hull and lain down beside him on his narrow bed.

  He lay stroking the golden meadows of grain, the black-green jungle-trees with their serpentine creepers, grasses, and garlands of lilies. He embraced the sea and was borne far out with her, laughing and diving in the warm, sweet salt of her waters.

  He drank and ate from the planet’s streams and vines and fields. He fell asleep in the planet’s arms on a scented velvet mound of fern and herbs.

  Later he returned, in the dream still, to Kayis. “Where have you been, Vilsev?” Kayis asked, in the cracked and icy voice of a witch from a fairy tale.

  “To bring you these, my dear,” he said, and laid two lilies on the floor. But they died in an instant. Smoke rose from their petals. Jealous Kayis had rejected his gift together with his lie.

  Days passed, short and goldenly peacock-blue. Extended nights went by in indigo star-drifts, singing with waves.

  Vils went out each morning at sun’s rise, on field-trips, taking with him the little machine that was, now, independently activated.

  It answered only on technical or safety matters. He adapted it somewhat to record. Now and then he patted or stroked its smooth little shell.

  Through these excursions he garnered quite an amount of information, independently of the station computers.

  At night also, frequently, Vils would go out. Generally he walked just as far as the shore, examining as he went the nightlife of the planet: electrocording the occasional murmur of the trees that continued their buzzing chirrup, if more quietly and interruptedly, beyond the ebb of dusk into darkness. The rainbow stars he elcorded visually. He fed all these transcripts back into the machines of Kayis later, for analysis and formal charting. (Due to his activities outside, certain chores he modified. A few items of daily routine he regulated, giving them less attention. His priorities were changed.)

  It was on his fifth night’s excursion that he sensed, quite close to him in the shadowland, some kind of living thing. Some being. It was not a lower animal, or he believed not. He had, thus far, come across no animal or insectoid life, exactly as the monitors predicted he would not. Yet here, on the fifth night, there was a presence.

  He was not alarmed, not afraid. But definitely he was startled. He had in his youth heard about, even somewhat himself experienced, the sort of composite yet non-actual energy that bloomed from the darkness itself, decidedly on nights lacking a moon — Jangala had no lunar satellites. This energy (or ghost) the people of his past who had manned the technicated farm, had refused to label. Such terms as earth spirits, or the spirits of old trees, or even dead humans buried about, were to them inventions. Nevertheless, Vils had often, in his childhood, wonderingly listened to descriptions of that tingling awareness of an other. It was a type of thrilling, awful certainty that, in an open and unpopulated landscape, no rodent or bird at large, you were not alone at all, but surrounded, enclosed by some entity, neither cruel nor kind, but savage as music. It was this that had, in primal eras, Vils later read, been confused with some nature god, the genius loci — spirit of place.

  Yet, standing in one of the transfixed statue moments common to him since stepping on to the new world, Vils had felt every hair on his skin lift into a quill. Hearing nothing (not even at that point the sighing sea), still he had heard a melodious yet tuneless music and felt himself without any doubt in the vicinity of another living force.

  He did not know what it was. He feared it, yet was fearless. He was attracted to it, yet shrank away. His blood danced. He wanted to fall down on the ground and worship or be one with it. And too he needed to run from it as far and as fast as he could.

  But.

  Unseen, unheard, untouched, unanalyzed, and unrecorded, the mystery slipped by him. It was gone. And he stood alone only in a beautiful star-flung night, with the vague returning purr of the trees and the love-sick moan of the wanton, reclaiming sea.

  So it was to the sea he raced, and trusting, or careless, he swam for a while under the lilting stars.

  He did not mention his experience to the station, did not enter it in the station’s files.

  The sixth night, he did not go out.

  By then he did not talk much to Kayis, anyway, other than to give essential requests or commands. Nor did Kayis, for that matter, communicate greatly with him.

  Rain fell in a silver curtain for three days and three nights.

  On investigation, it too was found to be pure. Visual evidence demonstrated that it revitalized the forests and the wild grain. The flowers, the lilies, and other flora gained new depths of color and meters in height.

  The forest sang more, also, both in daylight and after dark, but only when the torrent lessened, then, at last, ended.

  It seemed there were often brief rainy episodes of that type.

  Kayis and Vils both logged the information.

  The world sparkled, glittered.

  The stars seemed washed ever more brightly.

  After seven days, the rain started up again. Now Vils was tempted out to walk through the soaking forests and across the fields. He rejoiced in the soft and shining deluge. The station made no comment on his excursions; the rain was non-toxic: what could Kayis say? Vils even took the little dog-machine with him, ostensibly to assist him in recording facts and any discoveries. It was damp-and-corrosion proofed. Why not?

  During the following week, when the rain continued, pausing only here and there — for one of the miniature afternoons, or a spell near dawn, once for an entire night — Vils was sure that he sensed the external Presence several times, always in different spots.

  He began to note the occurrence, the chronomic hour and the place, the kind of light, whether rain fell and how strongly, other incident conditions.

  Eventually he put these records, along with the others, into Kayis’s computer for assessment. He added succinct notes, to the effect that he did not completely credit the phenomenon of a Presence to imagination. He was, after all, a trained observer and educated in the vagaries of the human mind. He suggested that perhaps another feature of the planet, real but certainly not supernormal, might be triggering his awareness. Some so-far undetected magnetic field, maybe, or a mobile energy inherent in the natural habitat. Something never yet come across elsewhere or that was never yet admitted to, or logged.

  Until then he had no longer been paying much attention to Kayis. In his efforts to shut up the childish side of his mind (which seemed to insist on mental jokes about the station, casting it as the jealous and possessive wife — the planet being his young exciting mistress), Vils had kept their communications to a minimum.

  However, having at last filed his comments on the Presence, he anticipated some response. It might be dismissive or even confirmatory. Though the last would be truly odd since, in that case, the station should have forewarned him, even suggested that he arm himself for external forays. When no response at all was given, therefore, Vils was puzzled. He took notice again of Kayis and all the internal surroundings that equivalenced his security and in which frankly by then he — like a fool — had lost interest. Unease woke in him. He recalled too various additional anomalies to do with the station that he had seen when outside.

  Among the field-pastures, for example, Vils had come across a line of machines in embryo, intended no doubt, when fully concrete, for survey and the harv
esting of the grains. Spindly objects, they were only partly compiled. They seemed to have been begun in the usual mechanical way, then the project put aside — deserted? Now and then he had chanced to take the same route and saw no advancement made. Proofed as they were against environment and weather they could survive adequately. But the evidence that the station had started on their manufacture and then left off was disturbing. Was something significantly wrong with Kayis, a flaw developed post landing here? Had some basic constituent part of the station’s “brain” malfunctioned?

  Vils worried.

  He collated minor events — a light in a corridor of the station that always currently winked and trembled, and had not been repaired; a lower deck door that had stuck and which he had not since used, having no occasion: was it still sticking? There had been slow deliveries of his meals and he had had to ask twice for something normally supplied. The water in the shower was hotter, or colder, than it should have been — but he had put that down to his own impatience, had not really considered it. Now, he did.

  He returned to Kayis from that day’s journey, agonizingly on edge. He had also foregone his habitual swim in the Sea of the Axe. For if Kayis were failing, very likely its analysis of the planet’s defects and virtues could be, even seriously, at fault. What slow poisons from rain and salt, flowers, creepers, scented air were already working in Vils’ body? And if Kayis were entirely to cease operating — in the name of Life — what on any earth could save him? He was no Adventurer, no survivalist, not in that sense. He had been trained in other matters. And was accustomed to the tender care of able machines.

  The lights on the fore-deck were dimmed, as often now they were before full night closed the outer world. Vils, as he entered, requested them to brighten. They failed to obey.