But the year-captain knows that the Abbot, if only he could be consulted in these matters, would focus on the third of those reasons, and would ask him whether it was likely that the other two would have had much force in his mind if the third one had not been driving him; and there would be no good answer to that. There never were any good answers to the Abbot’s questions. He never condemned; he left that job to you yourself; but he could never be fooled, either.
Alone in his cabin now, the year-captain closes his eyes and the formidable figure of the Abbot rises vividly in his mind: a small, compactly constructed man, a fleshless man, bone and muscle only, ageless, indefatigable. He was probably about a hundred years old, but no one would have been greatly astonished had it been demonstrated that he was twice that age, or three times it, or that he had come into the world in the latter days of the Pleistocene. He seemed indestructible. An unforgettable face: broad forehead, dense mat of curling dark hair, piercing violet eyes, firmly jutting nose, practically lipless mouth. No one knew his name. He was simply the Abbot. Had he founded the monastery? No one knew that, either. The residents of the monastery did not indulge in historical research. They were there; so was he; he was the Abbot. Beyond that, very little mattered.
The year-captain revered him. In the hour before dawn, when he would arise and go down to the icy shore for the first of the day’s rituals of discipline, he would always find the Abbot already there, kneeling by the water’s edge, holding his hands beneath the surface. Not to mortify the flesh, not to incur the sin of pride by demonstrating how much self-inflicted damage he could tolerate, but simply to focus his concentration, to clarify the operations of his mind. All of the Lofoten exercises were like that. One performed them for their own sake, and not to convince others or even oneself of one’s great holiness. Holiness was beside the point here; the monastery, in this entirely secular age, was entirely secular in its orientation.
The year-captain relives, for the moment, those Lofoten days. The jagged chain of bleak rocky islands, rising like the spines of some submerged dinosaur’s enormous back from the sea off Norway’s fjord-sundered northwest coast. A stark landscape here. The dark, stormy Vestfjord that separated them from the mainland. The white-covered alpine peaks towering steeply in the background, a wall of wrinkled granite. The sparse grassy patches; the sodden cranberry moors; the broad ominous breast of the Atlantic curving off toward the west. Once these had been fishing islands, but the swarms of silvery cod were long extinct, and so were the fishing villages that had harvested the abundant catch. Mostly the islands were empty now, except for the one where the monastery sat, a neat row of stone buildings a short way inland from the sea.
The Gulf Stream flows here; the climate is harsh but not as extreme as the Arctic location might suggest. After Ganymede and Io and Callisto and Titan, these Lofoten islands might seem almost like paradise. There are no cranberry bogs on Ganymede. There are no grassy patches. One would derive no spiritual benefit from thrusting one’s bare hands into the waters of one of Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, only a quick death. It was after his final excursion to the moons of Saturn that he had entered the monastery, leaving Huw to reap the glory of their exploit all alone. Returning from Saturn, he had felt a need to — was it to flee the society of his fellow humans? No, not flee, exactly, but certainly to withdraw from it, to go to some quiet place where he could reflect on the things he had seen and learned, the prevalence of living things in places like Titan and Io, the stubbornness of the life-force in the face of the most hostile of surroundings. What, if anything, did that stubbornness mean? What kind of ticking mechanism was this universe, and what forces had set it going? He didn’t really expect answers to those questions; he wasn’t entirely sure that answers were what he was really looking for. He wanted simply to ask the questions over and over again, and to discover, perhaps, some pattern of meaning thatconnected, rather than “answered,” them. Lofoten was there and available to him; Lofoten was suddenly irresistible. So it was to Lofoten he went — he was Scandinavian himself, and had always known of the place; going there was like coming home, only more so — and it was on Lofoten that he stayed, going down to the icy sea to clarify his mind by numbing his hands, until at last the enterprise of the starship beckoned to him and he knew he had to move on.
The Abbot had known it even before he had. “I have come to request permission to leave,” he had said, and the Abbot, smiling a smile as cool and remote as the light of the farthest galaxies, had said, “Yes, it is the time when you must carry us to the stars, is that not so?”
Huw says, “We’ll go down and take a look at it, won’t we?” And then, when the year-captain remains silent: “Won’t we?”
The Wotan has made the shunt out of nospace successfully once again, and Julia has executed the appropriate braking maneuvers, and now the starship hangs in orbit a couple of million kilometers above the surface of the second world of this nameless K-type sun’s solar system. For three days they have been studying the characteristics of that world via the ship’s instruments. Huw and the year-captain are looking at it now, a furry gray-white sphere centered perfectly in the view-plate. A planet-shaped blanket of thick cloud, with a planet hiding behind it.
What kind of planet, though?
“We have to go down and give it the old once-over, don’t you think?” Huw asks. There is something of a touch of desperation in his voice. The year-captain has been at his most opaque today, his inner feelings as thoroughly shrouded as the surface of that planet in the viewplate.
Once again Hesper’s long-range calculations have been miraculously confirmed by direct instrument scan. It has turned out to be the case that Planet B is somewhat larger in diameter than Earth but has very similar gravitation, and that its atmospheric composition is 22 percent oxygen and 70.5 percent nitrogen and 4.5 percent water vapor, which is a lot, along with a hefty, though not unmanageable, 1.75 percent CO2and assorted minor quantities of methane and various inert gases. That suggests a steamy tropical climate, and indeed the instrument scan has revealed that the mean temperature of this Planet B varies scarcely a degree from pole to pole: it is uniformly hot, a sweaty 45 degrees Celsius everywhere. A jungle world. Plenty of vegetation, photosynthesizing that lofty tonnage of CO2like crazy. The good old Mesozoic, waiting for them down there.
No visual evidence of cities or towns. No electromagnetic output anywhere along the spectrum from gammas up to the longest radio waves and beyond. Nobody home, apparently.
No oceans, no lakes, no rivers, either. A solid landmass from pole to pole. That’s odd, in view of the startlingly high proportion of water vapor in the atmosphere. All that H2O must condense and precipitate out occasionally, right? There should, in fact, be almost constant rainfall on such a world. Where does that enormous quantity of rain go? Does it all evaporate right back into the cloud layer? Doesn’t it collect anywhere on the surface in the form of large bodies of water?
The sonar probe shows something even odder. The planet is a big ball of rock, extremely skimpy on heavy metals, maybe on metals of any sort. Most of it is just basalt. But the sonar indicates that this world is swaddled in a huge layer of something relatively soft that covers the entire surface, theentire surface, not a break in it anywhere. Vegetable matter, evidently. A planetary jungle. Well, that’s congruent with the climatic and atmospheric figures. But this worldwide layer of vegetable stuff seems to be two or three hundred kilometers thick. That’s quite a thickness. The tallest mountain on Earth is only about nine kilometers high. The idea that this planet is covered by a wrapping of jungle that has roots going down twenty times as deep as Mount Everest is tall is pretty hard to accept.
The people of the Wotan, in the main, are still basking in the warmth of their own expectations about Planet B, which they have been nourishing all during the journey across nospace from the other solar system. For many months now they have been convinced that Planet B is the pot of gold at the end of their rainbow, and until they learn othe
rwise that is the attitude they are determined to maintain. But those few who have actually been looking at the direct data from Planet B have already understood that those expectations are doomed to be dashed, and they are starting to wonder how their fellow voyagers are going to react to the extreme disappointment that they have set up for themselves.
The year-captain says to Huw, finally, “Do you think the damned place can possibly be of any use to us?”
“Who can tell, unless we go down for a look?”
“I can tell from here. So can you. You know you can.”
Huw acknowledges the point with the most minute of nods. “It seems definitely unusual, I admit.”
“Too hot for us. No useful metals. No free water. Some kind of probably impenetrable jungle covering the whole thing.”
“We’ve come a long way to find it. Are we just going to move along without even sending out a drone probe?” Huw asks.
Once again the year-captain falls into unresponsiveness.
Huw says, “And, truth to tell, a drone probe isn’t what I have in mind. We need to get someone down there and check out Giovanna’s theory about the angels.”
“What theory is that?”
“You don’t remember? That the angels want us to get out of their territory altogether, and so they’ve not only fouled up Noelle’s transmissions but also did that job on Marcus and Giovanna and me when we landed on Planet B.”
The year-captain has locked himself behind some sort of wall and will not come out. “The very existence of these so-called angels is an unproven concept at this point,” he says.
“So it is, old brother. But by landing a couple of people on this planet in front of us, we can at least begin to get some determination of whether it’s going to be possible for us to occupy any planet at all without somehow first obtaining the blessing of these troublesome beings. If they exist, that is. What I’m saying is that if some of us go down there and wedon’t happen to hit the same problems that were encountered on—”
“I know what you’re saying, Huw.”
“We need to go and find out, wouldn’t you agree?”
The year-captain shuts his eyes for a moment. “Who do you propose for such a mission, then?”
“You, of course. Now that you have the legal right to go. And yet you don’t seem to want to, which I confess I can’t understand at all, old brother. You ought to be climbing all over yourself in your hurry to get down there.”
“I want to go, yes. If anyone goes. But the planet is probably useless for our purposes. Is it not a waste of time and perhaps lives to bother looking at it at close range? — Who else would you want to suggest for the mission?”
“Myself.”
“Yes. That goes without saying, Huw. Who else?”
“Nobody else.”
“Just you and me?”
“That’s right, old brother.”
“You argued for the necessity of a three-person expedition to Planet A’s surface,” the year-captain says.
“So I did. But just the two of us was enough for Titan and Ganymede and Callisto,” Huw replies. “We should be able to manage things pretty well by ourselves here too. We don’t need to put anyone else at risk. Look here, old brother, let’s send a probe down today and take some samples. And then you and I will descend and expose ourselves to whatever spooks may be in charge of things down there, unless there are no spooks, in which case we can begin to assume that even though Planet A flamed out for us, there is no reason to expect the same effects everyplace we happen to wander. What do you say, captain-sir, old brother?”
“Let me think about it,” the year-captain says.
In fact the year-captain most passionately wants to visit the surface of Planet B, and has been in the grip of that passion since long before the Wotan ’s latest emergence from nospace. He has been fighting against the idea, though, because he knows that his desire is a purely selfish one, and he feels that he’s had his quota of selfishness for the time being.
Obviously the planet is useless for the purposes of colonization. The year-captain knows that already, even if most of his fellow voyagers don’t. It has some bare possibility of being suitable for human habitation, yes, but the year-captain is certain even without first-hand on-site data that life down there would be endlessly difficult, uncomfortable, and challenging for them. A certain degree of challenge is a valuable stimulus to the growth of civilization, he realizes, but there is a point beyond that at which the human spirit is simply crushed by overwhelming struggle. That is what probably would happen here, the year-captain thinks. Better to write the place off without bothering with it further, and go in search of some other, less difficult, world.
And yet — and yet—
A planet, a unique unknown planet right out there within his grasp, a planet that beyond much doubt has given rise tosome sort of life-form completely beyond human experience—
He wants it. He can’t deny it to himself, not after the battle to win the right to take part in reconnaissance missions outside the ship. And, in the end, he allows Huw’s use of Giovanna’s variant on the angel theory to sway his decision. They do need to find out whether some omnipotent external force has decided to block their access to the worlds of space, and a landing on Planet B would shed a little light on that. Might shed some, anyway. A positive finding in that area might help to compensate for the letdown that people are going to feel when Planet B fizzles out, as the year-captain is sure it will, as a potential settlement site. So he authorizes the sending of one of the drone probes to collect a little more direct information about conditions down there, and lets it be known that a follow-up manned expedition will be the next step, if warranted by the drone’s findings.
Huw, operating the drone by remote control, puts it in an orbit a thousand kilometers outside Planet B’s murky atmosphere and does some infrared eyeballing to get a clue to what’s underneath the cloud layer. His cameras are capable of peeling away thicker fog than that, and they pierce right through, providing him with new mystifications.
“Look there,” he tells the year-captain. “Those hot lines everywhere. It’s like a big ball of twine down there. Or a lot of rubber bands wound round and round the whole place.”
“Vines, I think,” the year-captain says.
“A planet entirely tied up in a wrapping of vines? Vines two hundred kilometers thick?”
“We’ll need to take a closer look at it,” the year-captain says.
“I already have.” Huw kicks the imaging magnification up a couple of levels and cuts in an ultraviolet filter. “Now we’re looking just below the surface. You see the dark lines between the hot ones?”
“Tunnels?” the year-captain suggests.
“Tunnels, yes, I’d say.” Huw indicates the infrared readings. “And things moving in the tunnels, no?”
The year-captain peers closely at the screen’s blue-green surface. Dots of hot purple light, the purple indicating a temperature different from the temperature of the tightly wound lines, are slowly traversing the long darknesses that they have identified as tunnels.
“How big, would you guess?” he asks.
Huw shrugs. “Twenty meters long? Fifty? Big things, anyway. Very big. I don’t think we have a civilization down there, old brother, but I think we do have something.”
“Which requires investigation.”
“Absolutely.”
Huw grins. The year-captain does not. They understand each other, though. They will be shameless. Irresponsible, even. This is a useless world. But they want to see what’s down there; and so they will. They have earned the right. Curiosities must be satisfied. And — who knows? — they may even be able to answer some questions that very much need to be answered before the expedition can proceed to its next destination.
So the word goes forth to the ship’s community that it has been determined that a landing is desirable — no details aboutwhy that might be felt to be a good idea — and therefore a landing will be
made, and that Huw and the year-captain will be the landing party, and Huw sets about once more readying one of the probes for a manned voyage. And if anyone aboard the Wotan thinks that the year-captain is needlessly exposing two of the most valuable members of the expedition to great risk, that person does not share those thoughts with anyone else.
Huw winks broadly and does a thumbs-up as he and the year-captain secure themselves in their acceleration chairs. It’s a long time since these two have undertaken a mission of exploration together.
“Well, old brother, shall we shove off?” Huw asks.
“Whenever you’re ready, Huw. You’re the captain aboard this ship, you know. You make the decisions.”
“Right. Right.” Huw puts the little vessel under the control of the Wotan’s drive intelligence and the mother ship’s main computer takes charge, easing the drone out of the bay. When they are a safe distance from the Wotan the drone goes into powered flight and begins its descent from orbit.
The spider-armed lopsided awkwardness of the Wotan quickly gets smaller behind them. The cloud-swaddled face of Planet B expands with breathtaking swiftness.
Then they are inside the cloud layer, which the probe has previously determined to be nothing at all like the ghastly sulfuric-acid wrapper that covers Venus, but just a lot of plain H2O and some CO2, your basic veil of ordinary clouds, very, very dense but chemically harmless. They drop down through it and find themselves in the mother of all rainstorms, a planetary deluge of extraordinary intensity. It falls in green loops all around them, thick, viscous-looking rain. Now they understand where this world’s oceans are. They are in constant transit through the atmosphere, going up in the form of evaporation and coming down in the form of rain, and never once pausing to accumulate on the ground.
“It is a bitch of a place for certain, old brother,” Huw declares, as he takes over from the drive intelligence and begins to seek a decent landing place.
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