Starborne

by Robert Silverberg

  Silence, for a moment, at the other end.

  “Are you saying that he’s dead, Huw?” the year-captain finally asks.

  “I’m saying that, yes.”

  “Do you want to talk to Leon?”

  “About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.

  Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.

  “I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet, and it, doesn’t let up. You just go on and on, feeling horrible, every minute you’re here. Some minutes are worse than others, but none of them is ever any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, year-captain?”

  “We’ve been following your ground conversations. We have some idea of what it’s been like.”

  “You haveno idea, none. You only think you do. What shall I do with Marcus? Bury him here?”

  “No. Bring him back with you.”

  “You think he isn’t really dead?”

  “I think salvaging what we can of him for the ship’s organ bank makes more sense than putting him in a hole in the ground,” the year-captain says, sounding brusque. “You’re going to start back up here right away, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “That would be aborting the mission, captain. Do you want me to do that?”

  “You said the place is uninhabitable.”

  “I saidI think it’s uninhabitable. We’ve only experienced one small patch of it. Suppose this psychic field, if that’s what it is, is a factor only in this one region? The least I can do is check out some other area before we write the mission off as a complete failure.”

  “It’s cost us one life already, Huw.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we can’t use this planet before we give up on it. Marcus will really have died in vain if we let one bad experience spook us away from a planet that might have worked out for us had we only bothered to take a little more time for a good look at the rest of it.”

  Still another spell of nonresponse now from on high. Huw wonders what effect Marcus’s death is having on the year-captain and the rest of them up there. He himself is growing almost numb to it, he realizes. Marcus’s twisted form, lying right at his feet, seems to him to be nothing more than a badly constructed doll now.

  Once more Huw is compelled to break the silence himself. “Are you ordering me to abort the mission, captain?”

  “No. I’m not doing that. What’s your actual plan, Huw?”

  “I was originally going to make a trek to the seashore near here, but there’s no sense in that now. What we’re going to do is make a landing on a second continent, a brief reconnaissance. If we get the same kind of negative results there too, we’ll head for home right away. Bringing Marcus with us, as you request. What do you say?”

  “Go ahead,” says die year-captain. “Check out a second continent, if that’s what you want to do.”

  Huw closes Marcus’s faceplate and signals to Giovanna, and together they carry the dead man up the slope, down the far side, and across the basin to the ship. It is not an easy task, despite Marcus’s slenderness and the slightly lessened gravitational pull. The dispiriting emanations of this planet claw at their souls, robbing them of will and strength. But somehow they manage. They load Marcus into his acceleration chair and slide into their own.

  Giovanna says, “You’re really going to investigate some other site before we go back?”

  “I really am, yes. Don’t you think you can handle it?”

  “I think it’s a waste of time.”

  “So do I,” Huw says. “But we’ve worked very hard to get ourselves here. If I don’t make one more attempt at seeing if we can cope with this world, I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life whether I was too hasty in leaving. Humor me, Giovanna. I can’t turn back this fast.”

  “Even with Marcus sitting here next to us and—”

  “Even with,” he says. As he speaks, he is busy requesting lift-off assistance from the drive intelligence. The drone probe works its way through its sealing maneuvers, the hatch swings closed, and the usual array of readouts begins to announce the little ship’s readiness for going airborne. Huw does not attempt to take direct command of the vessel himself; he is too drained by what has occurred here, and he wants simply to sink back in his acceleration chair and let things happen around him, at least for a little while.

  They are in the air now. Heading eastward, flying at an altitude of a thousand kilometers, crossing a calm gray-green ocean with an almost waveless surface that has a curiously greasy look. Night begins to descend around them, and very quickly they are in darkness. This planet has no moon. The stars, against that pure black backdrop, are nearly as intense in their gleaming as they would be in space. Huw, studying the sky, tries to arrange the unfamiliar patterns into constellations. That one, he thinks, is something like a tree with huge feathery branches, and he traces another outline that strikes him as reminiscent of a dog’s head, and another that seems to be a warrior about to throw a spear. He tries to point these figures out to Giovanna, but she is unable to see them no matter how carefully he directs her to the key stars, and gradually Huw loses them himself in the general confusion of the bright cosmic clutter.

  The probe is over land again. A greenish dawn is breaking. Huw assumes manual control and searches for a good place to bring them down.

  This continent is one big desert, a sea of orange dunes. Perhaps it doesn’t radiate nightmare waves like the continent in the western hemisphere, but it doesn’t look like a very good bet for settlement all the same. From the air Huw sees nothing that might be a river, a lake, even a stream — just sand and more sand, and squat flat-topped hills separating one cluster of dunes from another, and some isolated patches of dismal scrubby vegetation. Still, he has come here for the purpose of finding out something particular about this side of the planet, and he intends to follow through on that intention.

  Huw sets the probe down carefully in a windswept area where the dunes have been pushed aside, and begins the hatch-opening procedure. But already the wrongness of this world is manifesting itself once more upon them, here in the first instants of their second landfall. He can feel the icy, invisible skeletal fingers scrabbling at his brainstem again, the queasiness expanding in his gut, the conviction that a web of some constricting fabric is being woven around his heart.

  There is a curse on this filthy place, he tells himself.

  He glances over at Giovanna. She nods. She’s feeling it too.

  “Let’s go outside anyway,” Huw says.

  “What for?”

  “To say that we did. Come on.”

  Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make actual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upward at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world: huge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, batlike beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.

  There is nothing in the sky. No monsters. Not even a cloud. />
  He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned odor of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is definitely choking.

  He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his faceplate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible planet.

  It is cold, harsh, thin air, the kind of air that Mars would have, perhaps, if Mars had any air at all. There is a disagreeable medicinal undertaste to it, bitter stuff: some unfamiliar trace element, no doubt, present in a quantity larger than Huw is accustomed to getting in his air. But he sucks it in anyway in great sighing gusting intakes of breath.

  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.