Starborne

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Starborne Page 11

by Robert Silverberg


  Innelda and Julia and Giovanna begin to speak all at once. But it is Sylvia’s light, clear voice that carries through the hubbub:

  “You’re an idiot, Paco. One live womb more or less, as you so prettily put it, one instrument of embryo nurture, won’t make any statistical difference in the long run. The handful of fertile men and women aboard this ship aren’t going to be a significant factor in populating New Earth, and you know it. What really matters is the gene bank downstairs and theex utero genetic machinery. We’ve got barrels of fertile ova stored safely away down there. And plenty of sperm too, thank you. That’s where the genetic diversity of New Earth is going to come from, not from us. Naturally we don’t want to lose any members of the expedition, but to claim that the women of the voyage are such sacred and special carriers of life that it’s folly to risk them in a planetside mission is nonsense, Paco, downright stupid nonsense!”

  “So you’ll volunteer for the first landing, then?” Paco asks her.

  “Has anybody called for volunteers? I would go if I were asked. Of course I would. But you who worry so much about our precious genetic heritage and our irreplaceable instruments of embryo nurture might stop and think a little about the logic of risking one of the two people on board who have a thorough understanding of how to operate our gene bank.”

  “I take it that what you’re saying is that you aren’t willing to go,” Paco says cheerfully. It is apparent to everyone now, by the light in his eyes and the lopsided smile on his face, that he is simply goading her for the sake of a little fun.

  Sylvia is a small and fairly timid woman, and this is an unusual situation for her. The stress of it is already beginning to show. “Isaid I would go if I were asked! But it would be idiotic to ask me. You go, Paco. All you’re good for is navigating and producing sperm. You said yourself that we have plenty of sperm available, so we can get along without yours in case you get killed down there. And if it’s a planet good enough to settle on, we won’t need a navigator any more anyway.”

  Julia and Giovanna applaud. So do Heinz and David, after a moment. Even Paco grins.

  Huw, who can be an extremely patient man, has been waiting with extreme patience while all this takes place. Now he says doggedly, as though the entire Paco-Sylvia interchange had never taken place, “If I may continue, then: three of us make up the landing party. The year-captain is the biologist. Marcus or Innelda will do the planetographic analysis, I suppose. And, naturally, I will drive the surface vehicle in which we will travel, and look after it in case of a breakdown. What do you think?”

  “What the year-captain thinks is a better question,” Heinz says. “But your list sounds good to me. Why don’t you go down the hall right now and let him know that you’ve picked his landing crew for him?”

  “I mean to,” Huw replies. “Just as soon as I finish this game.”

  He puts down his next stone. Leon stares sadly at the board and offers a countermove into Huw’s territory, but Huw heads it off with three quick moves that leave Leon’s stones encircled in a sea of black. Heinz and Paco come over to watch. Leon is one of the most experienced players on board, and Huw is still regarded as a novice; but Huw is murdering him with the aplomb and panache of an expert. He is playing now with the unsparing swiftness of the formidable Roy; he is playing almost on the extraordinary level that Noelle herself, the ship’s unquestioned champion these days, has attained. Leon seems rattled. He makes his moves too hastily, and Huw replies to each one with some crushing new onslaught. Two new enclosures sprout on the board, black stones throttling white. Leon peers at them for a time and shakes his head.

  “I resign,” he says. “This is hopeless.”

  “Indeed,” Huw agrees. He offers Leon his hand. “A good game, doctor. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Leon says, not very cordially.

  “You will all excuse me, please,” says Huw. “I will speak with the year-captain now.”

  Huw rises to go out of the lounge. He is a big, thickly built man, rumpled and inelegant-looking, who walks with the ponderous but confident rolling stride of someone accustomed to walking the deck of a seagoing vessel. As he crosses the room, he pauses to pat Paco appreciatively on the back, as though expressing admiration for his clowning. But also he blows a kiss in Sylvia’s direction. Then he proceeds down the corridor to the control cabin, where the year-captain is usually to be found.

  Huw and the year-captain are old friends, if anyone can be said to be a friend of the year-captain’s. They are the only two members of the expedition who actually have worked together in any sort of way before they were chosen for the voyage.

  Unlike the year-captain, who has chosen to reinvent himself every ten or twelve years with an entirely new career, Huw has devoted himself single-mindedly to planetary reconnaissance since he was a very young man. He is by nature an explorer. Some vagrant gene in his makeup has sparked an insatiable curiosity in him, not at all typical of his era: he seeks to move outward, ever outward, journeying through the realms of the universe, seeing everything that is there to be seen. The moons and planets in the vicinity of Earth first, of course. But it had always been his intention to be part of the first interstellar mission, which was already in the planning stages before he was born, and so he has spent his life designing, building, and testing equipment for use in the exploration of unfamiliar environments. Huw is a descendant, so he likes to claim, of Prince Madoc of Wales, who in the twelfth century set out with two hundred followers westward into the Atlantic and came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. And returned to Wales and recruited colonists, and went back to the land on the far side of the Atlantic to found a settlement of God-fearing Welshmen in the New World and to convert the Aztecs and other heathen to Christianity.

  Was it so? Of course it was, Huw would say. The account of Madoc’s voyage was right there in the chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarfan, theHistorie of Cambria, now called Wales, and who was he to call the learned Caradoc a liar? It was well known, Huw would tell you, it was a fact beyond question, that certain Aztec words were much like Welsh, and that Indians as far north as the Great Plains had been found to be speaking the pure Welsh tongue like true Silurians when the later European explorers arrived. And did Madoc’s blood truly run in Huw Morgan’s veins? Who could say it did not? There wasn’t a Welshman alive who couldn’t trace his ancestry, one way or another, to the glorious kings of olden days, and Madoc had been one of the greatest of those kings: there was no questioning of that.

  And so this jovial ruddy-faced son of Madoc had gone up from the green and placid precincts of happy Earth to ride in a silver bullet across the sun-blasted plains of Mercury, he had prowled the parched wastelands of Mars, he had risked even the corrosive atmosphere of Venus. He was a designer and builder of the equipment that protected him, the sealed and armored land-rovers, the doughty spacesuits. When he was done with Venus the moons of the outer worlds attracted him. Outward, ever outward: and it was on Ganymede of Jupiter that his path and that of the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan first intersected.

  They knew of each other, of course. Earth’s population in these latter days was so small, and the number of those of their particular cast of mind so few, that they could hardly not have heard of each other. But even a small world like Earth is quite big enough for two roving men to move about freely without bumping into one another, especially if they are periodically making excursions to adjacent planets.

  Lifewas what the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan was looking for. Not his own life; he had already found that, knew precisely where its center was located. But life outside himself, far outside, the life of other worlds. Mercury had none: the sun had baked it clean in the horrific intervals of daylight between the long spells of terrible night. The hidden landscape of Venus was too difficult to explore with any thoroughness, though it was not beyond hope that some organisms comfortable in blast-furnace heat under a carbon-dioxide
sky might have evolved there. Still, none could be found. And on Mars — grim, red, dusty Mars — microfossils four billion years old spoke of ancient bacteria and protozoa, but it did not seem as if they had left any living descendants on that harsh and uninviting world.

  The moons of Jupiter and Saturn, though — Io, Callisto, Iapetus. Titan, Ganymede—

  “I’m going to Ganymede to look for microbes,” the man who would be year-captain said, five minutes after his first meeting with Huw. “Build me an ice-sled and a proton-storm suit. And come with me.”

  They were very different kinds of men. Huw, cheerful and outgoing and exuberant, was surprised to find himself drawn so strongly to someone so remote, inaccessible, unsympathetic. It was the attraction of opposites, perhaps. They were mirror images of one another. And yet they wanted the same thing.

  Huw was puzzled by the odd combination of flightiness and profundity that was the Scandinavian man’s mind: the curious episode of the career in the theater with which he had interrupted his scientific work, for example, a thing that made no sense to Huw, and the peculiar medieval yearnings toward some sort of transcendental consummation that he occasionally expressed, and which also seemed pure foolishness to Huw. But despite all that, they quickly found themselves drawn toward one another. They both were fearless, hungry, determined to seek things that lay outside the placidities of the tame housebroken civilization into which they had been born.

  So they went to Ganymede together.

  Ganymede was the biggest of Jupiter’s moons, an immense ice-ball, cratered by billions of years of battering from space, grooved by the heavings of fierce internal forces. There had been an atmosphere here once, though now it lay in frozen heaps: ammonia, methane. Together the two men skated in Huw’s cunningly shielded sled in eerie pale sunlight over fields of muddy brown ice beneath the mighty eye of Jupiter. The great planet, ceaselessly spewing primordial energy, spit angry swarms of protons against them, but the magnetic fields of their suits deflected the onslaught. Could anything live, endure, replicate, under such a bombardment? In theory, perhaps, yes. They found no sign of life on Ganymede, though, nor on big Callisto nearby. Not a microbe, not the merest speck. Nothing.

  But volcanic Io was a different matter. An ocean of molten sulfur with a frozen surface; ice of sulfur dioxide forming white frost clinging to a silicate landscape; geysers spouting fiery plumes of elemental sulfur fifty kilometers high that came raining down as sulfuric snow, pastel yellow and orange with undertones of blue; and volcanoes everywhere, eternally belching, sending dense clouds of sulfur-dioxide debris booming skyward that tumbled back to ground like a rain of cannonballs. Here, on the night side of this dire turbulent terrain, under a black sky glittering faintly with the lethal electrical discharges from Jupiter’s huge relentless magnetosphere, the two explorers collected the first extraterrestrial life ever found: sturdy one-celled entities, closer in nature to bacteria than anything else, sulfur-loving things, bright dots of scarlet against yellow ice, spreading slowly and happily across the face of the frightful little world of which they were the supreme and absolute rulers.

  Huw danced wildly, ecstatically, around those little colored splotches, flinging high his hands, shouting thick-tongued nonsensical syllables that he wanted to believe were Welsh. His companion remained motionless, regarding him quizzically.

  “Come on, damn you,” Huw cried. “Dance! Dance! A celebration of life, damn you!” He took the other man by the hand, pulled him along with him, led him in a reluctant lurching acknowledgment of their great discovery.

  And then it was on to Titan for them, Saturn’s chilly Titan, big enough to have held its atmosphere, a place where methane sleet fell steadily out of a hazy hydrogen-cyanide sky. Luck was with them here too. By the gloomy shores of hydrocarbon lakes, under a thick layer of faintly glowing lemon-colored smog, they stared at sprinkles of orange against a gray shield of ammonia-methane ice. These, too, were living creatures. Biological processes of some sort were taking place here, anabolism, catabolism, ingestion, respiration, reproduction, whatever. Living creatures, altogether different from those of Io and unutterably different from anything native to Earth.

  Those two sets of alien splotches are still the only forms of extraterrestrial life that the human race has ever discovered, and the two men who found them stand face-to-face now in the control cabin of the Wotan.

  “We’ve been talking about the people who’ll be going on the landing party,” Huw says.

  “There’s been no decision about a landing party,” the year-captain replies evenly.

  “We can at least speculate about the makeup of the party.”

  “You can at least do that. But we don’t have any assurance yet that we’ll want to make a landing at all.”

  “If we do,” Huw says. “Let’s assume that much, shall we, old brother?”

  “All right. If we make a landing, then.”

  “If we do,” Huw says, “my feeling is that a group of three is our best bet: a biologist, a planetographer, and—”

  The year-captain says, “Do I understand that you’re proposing yourself as a candidate for my job, Huw?”

  Huw, bewildered, snakes his head. “Why do you say that?”

  “Naming the landing party is my prerogative. Here you’ve already worked out the proper number of people to go, and, I assume, the names of the actual personnel as well. Captain’s work. All right: you want to be captain, Huw, you can be captain. We’ll call a ship assembly and I’ll nominate you as my successor, and then you can pick anybody you like to go down for a look at Planet A. Assuming that you regard it as desirable to make a landing in the first place.”

  Huw is still shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand — I’m not trying to — I don’t want — I wouldn’t want—”

  “To be captain?”

  “Not at all. Not in the slightest bit. We both know that the captain can’t be part of the landing party. Listen, man, for Christ’s sake, I am not trying to usurp your captainly prerogatives and I most assuredly don’t want to be the next captain myself. I simply came down here to have a little preliminary discussion with you about the makeup of a possible landing party, and—”

  “All right,” the year-captain says, as calmly as though they are discussing whether it is getting close to time for lunch. “So tell me who you think ought to be the ones to go.”

  Huw, flustered and crimson-faced, says, “Why, you and me, of course. Me to drive the buggy, you to examine the biological situation. And Marcus or Innelda to work out the overall planetary analysis. That’s a big enough party to do the job, but not so big that we’d be putting an enormous proportion of the whole expedition at risk in one basket.”

  The year-captain nods. But he says nothing. He sits there silently, inscrutable as ever. Perhaps he is considering the best reply to make to what Huw has said; perhaps he is simply sitting there with his mind blanked out in the proper Zen-monk fashion, allowing Huw to fidget. Indeed, Huw fidgets. Huw thinks he knows this man better than anyone else alive, and perhaps that is true. But, even so, he does not know him nearly well enough. He has transgressed on some inviolable boundary here, he realizes, but he is not sure what it is.

  After a very long while the year-captain says, “You and me and Marcus. Or Innelda. All right. Certainly those are qualified personnel. And who is to become the next captain? Have you worked that out too?”

  “Man, man, I don’t give a bloody damn who is captain! What I care about is the landing party! You and me, old brother, the way it was on Io, on Callisto, on Titan — !”

  “Yes. You and me. And Marcus or Innelda. We agree on that. It’s a logical group, yes, Huw. But also we will need a new captain.” He smiles, but to Huw the smile seems no warmer than the landscape of Callisto or Ganymede. “We should hold the election immediately, I think. And then, once my successor is chosen, I’ll name the members of the landing party as my last act in office, and they will be the ones that you’ve proposed. You r
eally want to go, do you, Huw?”

  “Stop playing idiotic games with me. Of course I do!”

  “Then find me a new year-captain,” the year-captain says.

  At Lofoten I was taught how to put all vestiges of ego aside and live as a purely unattached entity, undistracted by irrelevant yearnings and schemes. And thereby to be a more perfect being, who will be more nearly likely to attain the dissolution of self that is the highest goal of the disciplined mind.

  I absorbed the teachings fully, yes, I did, I did. Even though the nagging feeling remained in me that by trying to make myself perfectly unattached I was in fact acting out the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, because I was setting out to try to turn myself into a god, and what is that if not self-aggrandizement? I remember how my Preceptor smiled as I told him all that. Obviously he had been down the same path himself. It was, he said, the paradox of striving toward unstrivingness, a circular trap, and there was no way out of it except right through the middle of it. Scheme as hard as you can to free yourself of the need for scheming. Drive yourself ever onward toward liberation from the slavery of goals. Exert merciless self-discipline in the pursuit of freedom from compulsive achievement.

  Well, so be it, I told myself. You are an imperfect being seeking to follow a course of perfection, and it’s altogether likely that you’ll hit a few problems along that way. I did my best, given the inherent limitations of the material I was required to work with, and by and large I think that the Lofoten experience got me closer to whatever it is that I’m searching for than anything I had previously done. But look at me now! Oh, just look! Where is all my nonattachment? Where is my freedom from fruitless and distracting striving?

 

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