Starfarers (4 page)

Strange, he thought, as often before, how half-familiar the scene was. The Solar System, where he had trained, held more foreignness than this, from red-brown Martian deserts under pale-red skies to the grandeur of Saturn’s rings. Here he weighed about the same as on Earth, the horizon was about as far off, a sun that looked much like Sol stood in a blue heaven, the breeze was just comfortably warm, sand gritted under wheels and dust eddied lazily over their tracks. But the oxygen-poor air would choke him, and everywhere around stretched barrenness.

The thought was equally old in him:
Well, why should we ever have expected more? Life on Earth took three billion years to venture from the seas to the land. Our giant Moon, a cosmic freak, may well have hastened that by the tides it raised. Give this life here a few more geological ages. Yes, of course it was disappointing not to find woods and flowers and big, fine animals. But we knew the odds were against it. Meanwhile, what a dragon’s hoard of scientific treasure we’re winning.

Steering by inertial compass, he topped a ridge and saw the fallen aircraft. Although it had dug itself half a meter into gravel, the composite body showed small damage. Impact had doubtless smashed most things inside. Nansen’s gaze strained. Shaughnessy—

Yes, there, tiny across a kilometer but on his feet! Nansen’s heart sprang. The rover rumbled downhill.

Shaughnessy staggered to meet him. Nansen stopped and dismounted. They fell into one another’s arms.

“Are you all right?” Nansen gasped.

“Barely, barely. It’s foul my air has gotten. Let me hook up.” Shaughnessy plugged into the large tank on the vehicle.

Weight penalty or no, Nansen thought, backpack units ought to include recyclers, the same as on spacesuits. Yet who could have foreseen? Every interstellar expedition was
a leap into mystery. Oh, yes, you could send robots ahead, as had been done at first, but then you’d wait too long for less news than humans would bring.

“Ah-h-h!” Shaughnessy sighed. “Like the breeze off a clover meadow. Or so it feels by our modest standards hereabouts. My father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you, my brother thanks you, and I thank you.”

The crew seldom spoke of kinfolk. When they returned home, the crossing would take a few days of their time—and a quarter century would have passed on Earth. You didn’t want to dwell on what time might have done meanwhile. Nansen forgave the tactlessness. He was too glad that his friend lived.

Anxiety: “Are you well otherwise, Mike?”

“I am. I did take a tumble on landing, which split my transceiver apart. We need a design more robust. Otherwise just bruises, not like my poor flyer. I’m afraid my fellow airmen will have fewer missions in future, Rico, for I’ll be claiming my share of them.”

“They’ll get enough other work to keep them out of mischief. So will you.” The groundside teams were turning up more surprises than they could handle. All extra help would be jubilantly welcomed. “Have you any idea what caused this?”

“I have a guess, after prowling and poking. I recorded it, in case I didn’t survive, but indeed I’d rather speak it in person over a mug of beer.”

“I can supply the person. The beer will have to wait.” A tingle went along Nansen’s spine. “What was it?”

“To my eye, the airscoop has corroded. You may recall, earlier I deposited chemosamplers at the Devil’s Playground hot springs. Sure, the material of the flyer is supposed to be inert, but that’s a hellish environment. My guess is that microscopic life is invading the land, and some kind of germ somehow catalyzed a reaction, maybe with the fullerene component. Let the scientists find out. The biochemistry here is so crazily different from ours.”

“¿Qué es?”
Nansen exclaimed. Alarm stabbed him. “Do you mean … our ship—”

Shaughnessy laughed, rather shakily, and clapped him on the back. “Not to worry, I do believe. Otherwise the whole gang of us would be dead. Those bugs must be confined to that area. Anyhow, exposure to space would doubtless kill them. We’ve lost an aircraft, but we may be about to make a great discovery.”

Discovery is what we came here for.

“If you’re fit to travel, let’s get back to the ship,” Nansen proposed.

“I am, if you go easy on the boost,” Shaughnessy said. “Especially with that beer waiting!”

“
Oh, you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road,

And I’ll be in Scotland before you;

But me and my true love will never meet again

On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”

Jean Kilbirnie sang only the chorus, almost under her breath. It faded away into the silence that had fallen since she and Tim Cleland reached the height. For a while, again, all they heard was the soughing in leaves overhead.

They sat on a bluff above a river. The westering sun, Tau Ceti, cast rays down the length of the vale, and the water shone like molten gold. Trees shaded turf, which nonetheless gave off fragrances to the mild air. After three terrestrial years, the first humans ever to see this world were calling it, in their different languages, Puerto, Limani, Kiang, Harbor.

Yet little here truly recalled Earth as Earth once was. The
sward grew low, dense, a mat of minutely convoluted soft nuggets. Some of the trees curved their twin trunks upward, lyre-shaped, until they broke into shoots lined with feathery foliage. Others lifted columnar in a pelt of leaves. Others suggested huge, fringed spiderwebs. Nothing stood green; everything was in tones of yellow or orange, save where a patch flared red. Nothing could properly nourish the visitors, and much would have sickened them.

It didn’t matter. That two evolutions, sundered by half a score of light-years, had been this alike—that you could walk freely, breathe the air, drink the water, rejoice in the beauty—was enough.

“You surprise me,” Cleland blurted.

Kilbirnie turned her head toward him. “How so?” she asked.

“Oh, I, well, if you’re feeling sentimental I … I wouldn’t expect you to show it. You’d be extra cocky. Maybe you’d sing one of your bawdy old ballads.”

Kilbirnie smiled. Her husky voice took on more than its usual slight burr. “We Scots can wax unco sentimental. Read your Burns—or ha’ you no heard o’ him?” She dropped back to everyday English. “This
is
our free day, our last day of peace.” On the morrow their group would break camp and ferry up to the spaceship. She had said she wanted to go off afoot, into the countryside. He promptly proposed coming along. She didn’t refuse him, but had not spoken much as they walked. “Our last look at this fair land.”

“You could have taken more time groundside,” he reminded her. “I suggested it—”

“Often.” She paused. “Don’t mistake me, Tim. I’m not complaining. There were simply too many wonders, in three short years.” Her gaze went upward, beyond white clouds and blue sky. “I had to choose. And, of course, I had my duty.” She piloted one of the boats that not only bore aircraft to and fro but had carried explorers throughout the system.

“I mean, well, you could have negotiated more Harbor-side time for yourself. I wish you had. We could have …” His words trailed to a halt.

She gave him no chance to continue them. “You were aspace too on occasion.”

“Very little.” He was one of the three planetologists who studied this globe rather than its sisters. His excursions off it had been for the purpose of observing it from outside. “I could wish I’d gone where you did. It was fascinating.”

She laughed. “Sometimes too fascinating.”

A ring of rocks whirling around the mighty fourth planet; a sudden, chaotic storm of fragments headed for the moon where Lundquist and his robots were at work; she, skillfully, heedlessly, defiant of doctrine, blasting from orbit elsewhere, down to the surface to snatch him off, even as the first gravel sleet and stone hail smote.
Cleland reached toward Kilbirnie. “Oh, God—”

She didn’t respond to the gesture, merely shrugged. He flushed and said defensively, “Harbor hasn’t been a hundred percent safe, either, you know.” He’d had a close call or two.

She nodded. “Untamed. Part of its charm. I envy the future colonists.”

“You’ve talked about … becoming one of them. I’ve thought about it”

Kilbirnie sighed. “No, not for me.” She glanced at him, caught his stricken look, and explained: “I’ve been thinking further. It’ll be a long while before the first emigrant ships leave Sol for anywhere. They’ll need better information than a preliminary expedition like ours could collect; and each voyage to here means a twenty-two-year round trip, plus time spent on site. And then the transports must be built, except first they must be financed, and—No, we’d grow old on Earth, waiting. Likeliest we’d die. Better to starfare.”

“Do you really want that? For the rest of your life? Returning each time to … to an Earth grown still more foreign?”

The somberness that had touched her deepened. Her voice lowered and shivered. The blue eyes sought his. “It was foreign already when we left, Tim. What will we find when we come back? After a generation. … At best, I’m afraid, worse crowding, more ugliness, less freedom. I doubt I’ll
care to stay. And the rest of the Solar System—well, we know too much about it. Nothing really new there.”

“You’d rather explore like this?” He groped for understanding. “Back here?”

She smiled afresh. “That’d be grand.” The smile faded. “But probably no such berth will be available in any reasonable time. Too few starships, too many stars.” Resolutely: “I’ll take whatever I can get, as soon as I can get it.”

The wind whispered through the leaves.

“You—you’ve been brooding,” he faltered. “That’s not like you. I hate seeing you … bitter.”

She had been hugging her knees, staring outward. Now she straightened, flung her head back, and cried, “Why, I’m not!” Quieter: “I’m sorry for other folk, but myself, no.” Her voice clanged: “A whole universe to adventure in!”

“Maybe never another world like this,” he argued desperately. “Nothing but d-d-desolation, poison air, like those other places we’ve heard of—nothing but a ship for your home, till you die somewhere terrible—” He spread his hands in their helplessness. “Jean, no, please.”

She patted his shoulder. “Och, I’ll be fine. And so will you, Tim. You’re bound to get a high position at some research institute or university or whatever they’ll have when we come back. The data we’ll bring, and all from the other expeditions, they can keep a scientist like you happily busy forever.”

He slumped. “Busy, yes. Happy, no.”

She withdrew her hand and sat wary.

He clenched his fists. “Jean, I love you,” rushed from him. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t.”

She bit her lip. A flight of small creatures buzzed past, their wings glinting.

“I’m sorry, Tim,” she said at last, low. “You’re a sweet man. But—Well, but.”

“Somebody else?” he mumbled.

“No.” Her utterance sharpened. “Hasn’t that been plain to see? I just want to wander.”

Shaken, he let loose what had been locked in his mind. “Was your life so miserable before?” Immediately: “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m sorry.”

“No need,” she answered. “I do wish, though, you’d take me at my word. I’ve told everybody what a good childhood I had, and then splendid times in Solar space before I got this berth, everything I could ask for. If I am a bit cross today, it’s because I recall how the things I loved, moors, woods, old towns full of kindness, old lifeways, I’ve seen them crumbling and by now they may be gone.” She shook her head. Gladness flowed back. “But the stars!”

She got to her feet. He stood up likewise, awkward and abashed. She caught his hands in hers. “Why this blethers about me? Oh, Tim, poor dear, I know how you feel, I’ve known for this past year or longer, and I
am
sorry.”

She kissed him. His response was shy. She laid her arms around his neck. His arms went around her waist. The kiss gathered strength.

She disengaged lithely. “Come,” she said, “we’d better get back to camp before sunset.”

While they
waited, Yu Wenji fell to remembering and hoping. She could not but say it aloud. “… and this time I’ll show you much more than my home village. We’ll go around the valley. Where the Hwang Ho winds among springtime blossoms—the loveliest land on Earth.”

“You may be prejudiced, my dear.” Wang Xi spoke absently, most of his attention on instruments and controls.

Yu, seated beside him, smiled. “City boy.”

“Well, I’m willing to be convinced.”

The screen they faced did not show the heavens as the naked eye would have seen them. At the center of the view, an image stood steady athwart darkness. Its blinding brilliance stopped down, Sirius A shone a hard blue-white; prominences like red tongues licked from the disk. The corona, its own light enhanced, was an opal mane. That amplification also brought background stars into vision. Sol happened to be in their direction, one spark amidst a throng.

The screen was not for scenery. It monitored an optical system that Yu had lately had to overhaul. Perhaps a lingering uneasiness about it—he was such a worrier, she often thought, such an overconscientious darling—struck through when Wang added, “Of course, you assume those things we knew will be there still.”

Yu stiffened. “They will be. They must. We won’t have been gone too long.” A year here, observing, probing, establishing robotic instruments which would remain to transmit further revelations. Seventeen years to and fro—aboard ship, less than a month.

“We’ll see.” They had been over this ground too often.

Happily, at that moment a bell tone sounded. “Hold!” Wang said. “It’s begun!”

Readings and displays came alive. He lost himself, concentrating on them. Yu’s attention ranged more widely, watchful for any possible malfunction. He was a researcher, she an engineer. But her work required a deeper knowledge of physics than many physicists possessed. Husband and wife had become a scientific team.

The data pouring in were more than an hour old. No living creature dared come near that huge sun, nor to its companion. They radiated too fiercely. This newly activated station was the first to take orbit around Sirius B.