I was grateful for the separation.
The team leaders and other Seniors kept to themselves but none of the younger would-be explorers like myself could sleep. My teammates and I found refuge among the cannibalized Rovers in Exploration, where we passed around some smoke and speculated about what we would find on Aquinas II. Snipe managed to get hold of a crude relief map of the landing area and we crowded around while Crow focused the rays of a portable glow lamp on it. Snipe and Crow were mutineers, but this was their first planet and they were as enthusiastic as the rest.
“Base camp should be here, to the north of this small mountain called Trefil. It’s relatively flat but it won’t take long to travel by Rover to the scarps and the highlands.”
“It looks flat,” Snipe said thoughtfully, “but it wouldn’t have to be very rough to make travel difficult.”
Hawk nudged me in the ribs. “What do you think our chances are of finding life, Sparrow?”
He and the others waited anxiously for my opinion, forgetting for a moment that I was only Sparrow. For all practical purposes planetary exploration was as new to me as it was to them, regardless of how many planets Aaron, Hamlet, and my previous incarnations had investigated.
The only planet I had memories of didn’t exist.
I shrugged. “It’s cold, probably too cold for life.”
“Life as we know it,” Eagle said, disappointed at my response.
“It doesn’t mean it was always too cold,” Hawk added.
Tybalt was not without a few star pupils.
“We should try and get some sleep,” Crow said, yawning.
“Yeah, we should,” Eagle agreed, and tied the end of his waistcloth to the rusted rollbar of a Rover so he wouldn’t drift away. He crossed his arms over his chest and Crow dimmed the glow tube and for all of thirty seconds nobody said a word.
“What was the gravity?” Hawk suddenly asked. “One point one? It’s going to be difficult walking around in our suits with that much gravity and the strong winds.”
I swore silently and untied my own waistcloth from a convenient steering wheel.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be so heavy it’ll be hard to blow you away.” I pushed toward the shadow screen. I had decided to go to the hangar deck and sleep under the stars. The Astron was so oriented in its parking orbit that you couldn’t see Aquinas II from there and the deck would probably be deserted.
The corridors were empty, though I could hear the hum of muted conversations behind the shadow screens that cloaked most of the working spaces and living compartments. I floated through the well that tied the decks together, passing by the one that housed the Captain’s quarters. It was the only deck completely lit and I supposed the Captain was holding a meeting with some of the team leaders. The hangar deck was two levels away and I had just started to twist around for a landing when I felt the light touch of air currents at my back.
“Sparrow.”
I grabbed at a nearby bulkhead ring to slow myself. When I turned, I saw the Captain close behind me, his eyes gleaming in the soft light from the glow tubes. For the first time, he was wearing something that looked like an official uniform—a skintight black halter that extended from his neck to his wrists and ankles. It was a moment before I noticed the fine tubing and realized it was the inner-weave for an exploration suit.
“I’ll be going in with you,” he said, smiling, then turned apologetic. “Not with your team—I’ll be setting up the base camp a few hours from now.” He clapped me on the back. “Aquinas II is the best possibility we’ve seen in generations, and God willing, I’m sure we’ll find something.”
Two thousand years of disappointments and he was still a true believer. I didn’t know whether to admire him or be depressed. His reaction was probably invariable, a conviction that this time was it, that this time the long voyage was not in vain. If Ophelia was right, he wasn’t capable of any other reaction.
“I’m looking forward to it, Sparrow. What about yourself?”
The Captain’s spirit was catching. Once again I could feel my emotions flip-flop towards him.
“My team can’t wait,” I said, which was true. “Neither can I.” Which was not true—the back of my mind was crowded with second thoughts.
“Nobody can,” he said. Then: “Where’s your team? They can’t be the only ones sleeping, everybody’s holding camp meetings all over the ship. I’d like to talk to them.”
The king, cheering on his loyal troops before the battle.
“Exploration—the glow tubes are out but they’re probably still talking.”
He pushed off for the well. “See you down below, Sparrow.”
It was then I said something I should have had the brains to keep to myself, knowing it would come back to haunt me.
“What happens if we don’t find anything?”
He spun around, no longer smiling.
“Then we’ll just have to keep looking, won’t we?”
I continued to the hangar deck, slipping through the shadow screen and hoping nobody else was there. One dim glow tube marked a distant well, but except for that, it was completely dark. I was feeling along the bulkhead for the palm terminal—its location light was out—when I ran into a loose bundle of tether line that some idiot had failed to secure. Loose coils of line were one of the major hazards on board; the spring and the tension in the coils lent them a life of their own. I kicked at it, annoyed, and some of the coils floated up around my legs and waist; I could even feel one slide across my throat. I pulled at a loop and the line around my neck promptly tightened.
Angered, I tugged various strands at random and then heard the faint rumble of a take-up reel. Somewhere in the dark somebody had turned it on, or else my tugging had triggered the reel into action. The rope grew taut and I flailed helplessly in the air as I was pulled toward the reel.
Would somebody else have the same idea and come up to the hangar deck to look at the stars and sleep? Initially, I had wanted to be by myself. Now I would have been grateful if the entire ship’s company had joined me.
It was getting harder to breathe and I panicked, only wrapping the coils tighter around my body. But I was also making a lot of noise, crashing into the bulkheads while I shouted for help.
A nearby glow tube suddenly came on and a voice said, “Don’t move, you’re only making it worse.”
He was behind me but I could tell by the voice who it was and I froze. Hands plucked at the coils around my waist, trying to unknot the line, and a moment later I was free to rub my throat and curse that it had to be Thrush who had saved my life.
His pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “It’s not like you to hide from all that enthusiasm below, Sparrow.” I started to say something and he held up a hand. “You don’t have to thank me—I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me. If you’d choked to death, I’d be the first one they’d blame.”
He disappeared through the shadow screen, leaving me to massage my neck and stare at the spot where he had been. In retrospect, I thought I had heard movement when I first came on deck. And what was Thrush doing there anyway? I shrugged; probably the same as me. I couldn’t believe my struggles could wrap the line around my neck so tightly but neither could I believe that Thrush had flicked the switch on the take-up reel. His own logic was too convincing—he would be the first the crew would accuse.
It didn’t occur to me until later that I had more enemies than one and that Thrush had indeed saved my life. He had told the truth when he gave his reasons, but he hadn’t told the whole truth.
****
Aquinas II was hell.
It was storming and winds buffeted the Lander for almost an hour before we found a safe place to set down. We were frightened and sick; even Tybalt and Ophelia looked green around the gills. When little Quince ducked into the lavatory for five minutes, I guessed he had chosen to empty his stomach in private.
We settled in a rocky area half a dozen kilometers from base camp and two from a methane ri
ver that had gouged a rocky channel and left cliffs towering fifty meters on either side. Despite what we might have thought before, once on the planet’s surface we all had hopes of finding living creatures in the eddies of the river or simple fossils in the stratum of the confining cliffs. It was a relatively young planet and none of us thought that any life forms would be very large or threatening. But I also knew none of us had forgotten the monsters Tybalt had conjured up for target practice.
The Rover had been weatherized and we huddled in its belly as it lumbered over rocks and forded small streams on its way toward the river. The wind howled around the metal hull while we fingered our way through the snow and smog with searchlights. We could see ahead for perhaps thirty meters; then everything was veiled by the swirling, dirty snow.
We didn’t stop until we were near the river and boulders blocked the way. Portia ordered the hatches opened and we crawled out into the slush that was building up around the treads. I had a sense of deja vu even though Aquinas II was vastly different from Seti IV. Was it really happening? I wondered. Or had I been drugged and stuffed into a data suit to fumble my way through another artificial reality, one as real to me as a genuine planet?
But there were familiar faces behind the visors of those around me and their voices were comfortingly loud in my headset.
“Tybalt’s team will explore the riverbank and descend to the stream itself.” Another Rover had clanked up and Ophelia waved at the suited figures as they climbed out and trudged toward the river, maybe a hundred meters away. Before they had gone a quarter that distance, their helmet lights were lost in the driving snow. “Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, go with Portia. Sparrow and Snipe, follow me.”
She turned toward a low-lying scarp another hundred meters in the other direction. The river originally had been wider and over the eons had cut itself two beds.
I followed Ophelia, fighting my way against the screaming wind, suddenly afraid that I might lose both her and Snipe in the gloom. My life-support systems were working at maximum but I could still feel the cold seeping through tiny chinks in my boots and sense it chilling the tips of my gloves. A small leak in the suit and I would freeze to death before I could get back to the Lander.
Ophelia was in the lead and I worried whenever she disappeared in a sudden swirl of dirty snow. It worried me just as much that the wind seemed to be getting stronger and I was losing traction because the slush was freezing in the grooves of my boots. If we hit a slope and I started to slide, there would be little I could do to stop.
Hamlet, I thought bitterly, would laugh at all of this; but then, he’d had twenty years of practice at being Hamlet and I’d had only a few months being Sparrow. It’s easy to be brave when you’ve had the experience.
Ophelia’s voice suddenly rattled in my headset. “There’s a gully just ahead that splits in two.”
A moment later the three of us were shining our helmet lights at the entrance, trying to peer through the snow at what lay beyond. The wind roared around us and there were moments when we had to hold onto each other for support. The gully, at least, would offer some protection so we could concentrate on work. We had our sample baskets and image cameras and what we had to do wasn’t that difficult—pick up a few rocks, take a few pix of strata, and then return to the Rover and the Lander. Back on the Astron we would fill in the maps and make preliminary notations for the geologists.
And maybe we would take back a surprise or two.
“Sparrow, take the left leg. Snipe and I will take the right. Meet back here in thirty minutes. Take samples of anything that looks interesting—and watch your footing.”
A few feet into the gully the wind died away, though I could still hear it shrieking overhead. The banks were several meters above my helmet and my radio headset’s whip antenna just cleared them; I would be in touch with Ophelia and Snipe most of the time. We had orders to check in with each other every five minutes, and timers in our helmets to remind us.
Snipe, as always, sounded in complete control.
“Don’t get lost, Sparrow.”
“I’m not about to.”
“If anybody could—”
“Keep the frequencies clear for reports,” Ophelia interrupted, annoyed.
Snipe shut up and I concentrated on the ravine walls, at the same time keeping to the middle of the small gorge to avoid anything falling on me from above. The gully walls were rough and dark, worn by the winds and the spring floods of methane. I dutifully hammered at a rock or two and took some image pix of formations I didn’t recognize. But I found no section of the rock walls that exposed different strata and thousands of years of planetary history.
The gully suddenly widened, its banks drifting away from each other.
“I think I’ve hit a lakebed,” I said into my head set. “Can’t tell the size.”
“Keep to… sides… don’t…”
Ophelia’s voice was intermittent and weak and I glanced up with alarm, noting that the banks were now above antenna height. If I continued on, I would be out of contact. I hesitated, but in the back of my mind was the picture of Hamlet laughing as he skidded down a methane mountain. I decided to risk it for a few minutes more. At least I would be protected from the howling wind.
Two hundred meters farther on, the gully wall dropped off sharply to the right; I faced a solid blanket of fog and driving sleet. I could see nothing at all, though a heavy roaring sound came from somewhere within the fog bank. Then the unpredictable wind brushed aside the snow and fog like a curtain and I stared in wonder at a shallow valley a dozen kilometers wide. At the bottom was a small lake and at the far end, I could just make out a methane fall thundering over the valley’s rim. Falling liquids! I had never seen liquids cascading in a fall, and the sight was both strange and beautiful. I could visualize the valley filling in the spring and the overflow racing through the gorge to the river beyond.
The air was filled with dirty flakes of drifting snow and the fall at the far end was half obscured by haze. But the scene was striking—and unsettling. Except for some of the compartment falsies and the artificial reality of Seti IV, I had never been in the open. Even during the landing and the trip in the Rover, the snow had closed us in. Suddenly the horizon was no longer determined by the snow and the fog or by a bulkhead one or two hundred meters away at the end of a corridor. My only experience with a limitless horizon had been on Seti IV; but the scene now before me had far more depth and detail than Seti IV had had and I could feel my stomach knot with sudden anxiety.
At the same time, it was humbling to realize that not only was I the first human being to see the valley, I was probably the first living creature in the entire universe to see it.
For just a moment, I thought I understood both God and the Captain.
Then the winds shifted, the valley disappeared, and I had to fight my way back to the gorge. I struggled through the slush to where the gully wall became a cliff twenty meters high. I was standing close to the rock face snapping image pix of the different formations when pebbles rattled onto my helmet. I glanced up. The rim above was actually an overhang where the rushing floods of methane had undercut the banks. I was staring at it, puzzled, when the puff of a small explosion just under the rim caused more pebbles and rocks to rain down.
I didn’t move. Small explosions don’t happen by themselves. Then my surprise turned to alarm as another rockslide tumbled down the bank.
Something was shooting at the overhang. And if it gave way, I would be buried under tons of rubble.
Another small explosion and another shower of dirt and stones. I stood there in shock and panic, forgetting all the research I had done but remembering with remarkable clarity all of Tybalt’s stories.
My first thought was that Tybalt had been right.
****
I struggled back up the gully, staying close to the wall and looking for cover. The overhang might come down and bury me but there was no protection at all in the open except for the thick gusts of
swirling snow.
Whatever it was followed me, firing another shot every few seconds. There were boulders at the bottom of the ravine, but nothing large enough to hide behind. Besides, my enemy was on the opposite bank, shooting down at me. There were a few caves in the ravine wall, but none into which I could squeeze. And if I had, I would have been a stationary target, sooner or later to be buried alive.
I slipped more than once in the slush, terrified that the sudden falls would loosen some of my suit disconnects. Then it would be a toss-up whether I froze to death or died breathing a mixture of nitrogen and methane so cold my lungs would turn to ice within a breath or two.
The pattern of shooting suddenly changed, with shots aimed at the ground before my boots, trying to drive me back under the overhang. The top of the gorge still towered above me, but a pile of boulders in the middle looked just high enough that if I climbed it, the whip antenna might clear the banks and I could call Ophelia and Snipe for help. But climbing the boulders would expose me even more…
Or would it? I had already been exposed. A dozen times. And never been hit. Why try to hit the overhang, why not me? What reason required that I be crushed by a landslide rather than have my suit punctured so I could die from the cold or the unbreathable atmosphere?
Perhaps I had discovered life on Aquinas II. Perhaps creatures had evolved who were smart enough to make explosive weapons and who had a psychology strange enough to want my death and burial at the same time.
But I really didn’t think so. The planet was young and I found it hard to believe a local version of Tybalt’s aliens existed.
My alternatives were my fellow crew members. On a planet where simple walking was a hazard, a landslide would never be questioned. A suit with pellet holes in it would be.
I forced myself to forget my panic and consider the problem. Once I did, the answer was obvious. Unlike Ophelia, whom he had accused of believing in nothing, Tybalt believed in everything. His team would have gone in armed.
The Dark Beyond the Stars Page 21
