"Yarrun," I said, "check out the south lake. The southern shore."
He rubbed a dial. Far below us, one of the four probes sacrificed almost all its airspeed as it arrowed into the water. The splash was big enough for the other three probes to register: a pimple of red marked the splash point on the viewmap, until the computer factored it out.
"The water is fresh," Yarrun reported as the sunken probe began to return data. "The usual natural trace elements; no signs of industrial pollution. Microorganism count measures a bit low."
"Does that mean anything?" Prope asked.
"Probably not," I told the captain. "Lots of simple factors could decrease the micro count in a given area — anything from a strong current, to a recent rain, to a nearby school of filter-feeders."
"Still… it seems a little sinister, don't you think?"
I ignored her.
The Bluffs
"Let's concentrate on these bluffs," I said, pointing to a line of elevation on the south side of our chosen lake.
"Why there?" asked Chee as Yarrun twisted dials to send the three remaining probes on a close flyby.
I thumbed a dial myself to magnify that area of the map. "Along the top, we have open fields… good visibility. If we're in for a long stay, we can get fresh water from the lake, but in the short term, we'll be far enough away that we don't have to deal with the complexities of shoreline ecologies."
"What if something unspeakable charges the party and knocks you off the cliff?" Prope asked.
"If we see something unspeakable, I for one will jump off the cliff," I answered. "Our tightsuits will protect us from the brunt of the impact, and the long leap is a nice fast escape route."
Prope's expression showed what she thought of people who would jump off a cliff rather than face something unspeakable; but she held her tongue.
Pictures
"Pictures," Yarrun said; and the map on the screen shimmered to show a sunny meadow dotted with yellow wildflowers. Off to one side stood a deciduous tree, something like a maple; a bird flitted into the leaves, too fast to see clearly, but it had two wings, a small head, and a black or dark brown body. A few dozen meters behind the tree, the land dropped off at the edge of the bluffs, down to the sparkling blue lake.
The view slowly shifted as the transmitting probe moved along. We saw a gray rock outcrop, more deciduous trees, a thicket of brambles. Something darted into the brambles, and my mind said "rabbit" …but an Explorer had to ignore such snap judgments. The human brain is still hopelessly tied to Old Earth; it always interprets a fleeting image as something terrestrial, no matter how alien the creature might really look.
"Try it ten kilometers to the east," I said. Yarrun played with dials.
Prope sneered. "You think the meadow looks too dangerous?" she asked.
I tapped the screen. "Didn't you see that animal run into the briar patch?"
"You're afraid of a little beast like that?"
"I'm wary of a little beast like that," I told her. "I'm afraid of whatever the little beast was running from."
Our Choice
The picture dissolved into a view from another probe, this one hovering over the lake and looking shoreward to the bluffs. The cliffside was tangled with weeds and scrubby bushes. Here and there, swaths of bare sandy soil interrupted the undergrowth — gullies probably washed out by spring runoff. Erosion was slowly undercutting the top edge of the ridge; at one point, the rim had collapsed in an earth slide that dragged down a great strip of brush.
The probe moved toward the land, and slowly rose to give us a view of the heights: another flowered meadow, with a few lichen-covered outcrops of rock. A short distance inland, a deep ravine ran parallel to the bluffs — probably the bed of a stream on its way to the lake. Trees grew up the sides of the ravine, but none were visible on the flat land.
"This an example of what we were talking about," I said, pointing at the screen. "If you have trees growing in the ravine, you should have trees growing in the field — it has to be easier for them to root on level ground than on a slope. But it looks like the flat has been cleared."
"Is that enough to scare you off again?" Prope asked.
"Not in the least," I answered, working to keep my temper. "Cleared terrain is good for a Landing. You're less likely to hit something on the Drop, and you have an unobstructed view of things coming to eat you." I turned to Yarrun. "What about it?"
Instead of answering, he fiddled with dials, rotating the screen's view through a slow 360 degrees. The meadow seemed very peaceful… no motion but the gentle waving of grass in the wind. "The motion sensors are picking up a lot of animal life," he reported, "but nothing big. Mostly on the order of insects, with the occasional field mouse. Which is to say, something warm-blooded the size of a field mouse."
It was easy to forget this wasn't some tame terraformed world, stocked with all the species we knew, and loved, and could kill if necessary.
"Any thoughts?" I asked the room at large. Prope looked as if she wanted to say something scathing, but knew it would only delay things. "Okay," I told Yarrun. "Have the probe drop a Sperm anchor. Immortality awaits."
Part V
LANDING
Our Robing Chambers
The Jacaranda had four robing chambers for Explorers. This was a matter of prestige. A frigate was equipped with only two robing chambers; a light cruiser had to surpass a frigate in all possible ways, so it had three chambers; and a heavy cruiser like the Jacaranda was obliged to be better still, so it had four.
All three types of ship carried only two Explorers. There was no prestige in having extra Explorers.
Suiting Up
Each of us suited up alone — Yarrun and I in our usual places, Chee in one of the dusty surplus chambers.
Suiting up was a simple procedure: I stood passively, wearing nothing but a light chemise, while robot arms did all the work. Tightsuit fabric was extremely stiff and difficult to handle. Every six months, I had to go through an emergency drill where I wrestled in and out of a suit without robot help, and it always left my hands aching with exertion.
As the suit was being sealed around me, Chee shouted through the wall, " 'And from the tents, the armorers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.' What's that from, Ramos?"
"Shakespeare… Henry V," I replied, glad that I happened to remember; but I hoped Chee wouldn't quote from Timon of Athens. I had skipped Timon in the Academy Shakespeare course; Jelca had actually said yes to going on a date, and it put me in such a dither, I couldn't concentrate for three days.
The tightsuit continued to assemble around me. As it came together, robot eyes scanned every joint and seam, checking for flaws. There were eight such eyes, each as wide as my thumb, each on the end of a metal tentacle that curled through the air with the nonchalance of a cat's tail. Yarrun had given each eye a name: Gretchen, Robster, Clinky, Fang… I forget the rest. He swore they had different personalities, but I think he was putting me on.
The eyes swirled about on one last inspection-peering into my suit's crotch, armpits, the ring around my neck that my mother always claimed was dirty — then the tentacles retracted into the walls and the sterilization process began. I saw none of it; the visor in my helmet opaqued in response to the opening salvo of microwaves. However, I knew I was being bombarded by heat, UV, hard gamma, and several more exotic forms of energy the League of Peoples contended were necessary to cleanse all possible contaminants from the skin of my suit.
We followed this procedure meticulously whenever landing on unexplored planets — especially ones where there might be intelligent beings. It was a dangerous non-sentient act to introduce foreign microorganisms onto someone else's planet.
The sterilization bombardment was another reason why we always let the robots seal us into our tightsuits. If you touched the exterior of a suit with your bare hands, the resulting fingerprints turned a burnt-looking brown under the onslaught
of the sterilization energy. You ended up looking like some smear-handed child had wiped chocolate on your crisp white outfit.
Fellow Explorers didn't tease you about that, but the Vacuum personnel always snickered.
Limbo
When the sterilization was complete, a bell chimed and a blue sign flashed PLEASE EXERCISE. For five minutes, we were supposed to get used to moving in the suit, by stretching, picking up small objects, doing deep knee bends, and so on. The Admiralty called this the "Limbering-Up Period." Explorers shortened the name to "Limbo."
It was a point of pride that Explorers never limbered up as specified. The prescribed exercises were invented by an Admiralty consultant who tried on a tightsuit and found (to her surprise) she couldn't get the hang of it right away. Never mind that Explorers spent much of their four years at the Academy lumbering around in tightsuits. Never mind that by the time we graduated, we felt more at home in a suit than in street clothes. A consultant came in for a day and found she was clumsy; therefore, the Admiralty immediately agreed that her ideas about tightsuits should become official Fleet policy.
The de facto Fleet policy was more mundane: instead of exercising, Explorers used their five minutes of Limbo to empty their bladders. Tightsuits had extensive facilities for handling waste, recycling the liquids into coolant water and compressing solids into cubes that could later fertilize mushrooms; but actually using these facilities required painstaking attention to the alignment of valves, tubes, and bodily orifices. It was better to relieve yourself in the quiet safety of the ship than to try it under more stressful conditions planet-down.
Besides, thinking about the mechanics of pissing took your mind off the Landing. And if you let yourself get sloppy, your suit would stink of urine for the whole mission. An Explorer could pay a severe penalty for inattention; it didn't hurt to have that kind of reminder in your nostrils for a few hours.
One Minute Warning
The PLEASE EXERCISE light went off. That meant we had one minute left. One more minute of Limbo.
During this minute, some Explorers prayed. Some sang. Some discussed final details of the Landing over their radios. Some talked to themselves about the great or mundane regrets of their lives.
Some screamed.
I don't know what Yarrun did. He never told me. I never asked.
If he had asked me the same question, I couldn't have told him what I did. I just waited. I just waited the full minute.
The Admiral's Worth
But this time, I somehow couldn't bring myself to wait in silence. Instead, I tapped a button on my throat to turn my transceiver implant to "local."
"Admiral," I said.
"Hey! What?"
"Admiral, tell me something you've done that you're proud of."
"Christ, Ramos, you should know better than to distract a man at a time like this."
"Tell me something you're proud of. I want to know what you've done with your life. I'm going to die for you; I want to know who you are. If there were a point to any of this, would you be worth dying for?"
Chee didn't answer immediately. I could hear Yarrun's breathing over the headset in my helmet. It was a little like snoring; his lip fluttered slightly when he inhaled.
I wondered why Yarrun had his transceiver turned on. Had he intended to say something too? And would he have spoken to me or to Chee?
Something to be Proud Of
"The thing I'm proudest of," Chee said at last, "is my spy network."
"Spy network?" I repeated. "What's the point? The League of Peoples enforces peace throughout the galaxy. We have no wars. We have no enemies."
"We have incompetents, Ramos," the Admiral answered. "On every planet, colony, and Fringe World, the civil administration suffers the same malaise as the Outward Fleet: the people who rise to positions of leadership are the Propes and the Harques. Administrators like Prope funnel citizens' money into glamorous projects like erecting public buildings so big they change the course of continental drift… and no one remembers to order toilet paper. Or food. Or air. Administrators like Harque spend their time in petty political maneuvering, snubbing rivals, acquiring perks, and generally feathering their own nests… but the results are the same. No toilet paper. No air. While all the tinpot tyrants backstab each other for an office with its own pressure pot, no one minds the store. Supply schedules get botched; atmosphere plants break down; water purification levels slide into the red zone.
"So on every world of the Technocracy, I put a spy. A retired Explorer, actually. Explorers are the last bastion of competence in our civilization, Ramos, and I don't mind saying it. They're the precious few of our citizens who aren't comfortable — the only ones in the whole Technocracy who work completely without safety nets. Everyone else these days has the luxury of indulging in melodrama: of pretending that they're the stars in some story where there are good guys and bad guys, winners and losers. Everyone else can pretend it's a game. The streets are safe and the government is forbidden to let people starve, so whatever non-Explorers do isn't survival… At heart, it's just amusement. Explorers are the only ones who know deep down that death isn't kept at bay by luck or posturing, but by constant attention to necessary details.
"Therefore, my Explorers finked to me when the tap water turned brown, and when the air turned to smog, and when there weren't enough oranges on the shelves to prevent scurvy. Those warnings gave the Admiralty a fighting chance to do something about the situation… because you know what the civilian authorities are like on most planets. Power-hungry vermin whose only talent is winning elections, not making good decisions. When something goes wrong, you can be damned sure those administrators would rather see their whole worlds starve than report that they'd personally fucked up."
"You talk about your spies in the past tense," Yarrun observed.
"I'm past tense now," Chee answered. "When I'm gone, who'll take over for me? A Prope? A Harque? I'm going to god-be-damned Melaquin because I finally ruffled one too many important feathers. The High Council will replace me with some VIP's unemployable nephew… and a lot of planets will start drowning in their own sewage."
Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. Explorers never asked, "What happens next?" The question was always, "What do we do now?"
The door to the transport bay slid open.
Our time in Limbo was over.
Bold Grace
Walking comfortably in a tightsuit made a person look bowlegged-the fabric was thickened on the inside of each thigh so that one leg rubbing against the other wouldn't encourage the material to fray.
Once we were planet-down, it didn't matter what we looked like; but our walk along Sterile Corr-I was different. The corridor led from our robing chambers to the transport bay, and Vacuum personnel watched us on monitors, every step of the way. Each time I walked that path, I felt the eyes following me. For personal vanity and for the pride of the Explorer Corps, I forced myself to stride along with bold grace.
Learning to walk so cleanly had taken three months of hard practice at the Academy. Resisting the force of the fabric required strength in thigh muscles which were rarely used for other purposes. (Rarely used by me, at any rate.)
I let myself stride into the corridor with consummate poise. Yarrun stepped out of his own chamber and matched my stride. I hoped Prope and Harque were watching… even though I didn't give a damn about either of them.
Chee, the Explorer
A moment later, Chee emerged from Chamber C. He moved with slow, straight-legged dignity. His suit showed no chocolate-colored fingerprints.
"So, Ramos," he said, "do I look like an Explorer?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, I don't smell like one!" he snapped. "When you radioed me without warning, I fumbled my damned tube and pissed myself. Let's get down to the damned planet so I can take this helmet off."
Three abreast, we strode into the transport bay. The door closed behind us, and a metal safety hatch slid up in front of it.
With a t
ap, I switched my throat radio to full transmit. "Ramos to Jacaranda," I said. "Is the tail anchored?"
"Affirmative, Explorer." The voice coming over my headset was Harque's perpetual smirk. "Pressurizing now."
The ship's Sperm-tail was now in position at our chosen Landing site, establishing a tube of hyperdimensional space from here to there. In effect, here was there; no physical space separated us from the planet's surface. The Jacaranda would increase air pressure in the transport bay, just enough to exceed the pressure at the planet's surface. Then, when the Bay Mouth opened, we would be squirted forward, down the tube to the planet, making the passage in a real-space time of zero seconds.
The subjective time would not be zero seconds. Human brains are perfectly conscious of the time they spend in hyperspace, even if the outside world perceives the transit as instantaneous.
Harque's voice sounded again in my headset: "Ejection in ten seconds."
I jerked my head around to glare up at the mezzanine, where Harque loomed behind the control console. He was supposed to wait for my signal before starting our ejection countdown. Insulting to the last, the petty bastard.
Yarrun nudged my elbow, and shook his head.
Fuming, I turned back to face the huge aperture in front of us: the Aft Entry Mouth, which was irised tightly closed for the moment. From this vantage point, the Mouth seemed immense-four storeys high and ready to eat us. Yarrun, Chee, and I, stood tall, shoulder to shoulder… and that mouth could swallow all three of us in a single gulp.
I closed my eyes. I had thought that perhaps this time, this last time, I would keep my eyes open. But I didn't.
"Ejection," Harque said.
Down
Down was the pull of ship's gravity beneath my feet. There was a sharp hiss of sound as the Mouth opened.
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