his thoughts and emotions subtracted from the equation. He had imagined a wondrous, totally alien world, but the reality of being here was that he was slightly disappointed—because he was himself and had not been changed by the experience. He still carried his old worries and disappointments: his guilt over his father and what Julia had said to him at their final meeting.
Hell, he thought, we can go halfway across the galaxy and never really get anywhere.
He shrugged. “I’m looking forward to reaching the settlement,” he said, which was true, even though he knew that once he was there he would inevitably feel some sense of dismay, no matter what they discovered. He recalled telling Ella’s ghost that reality was never as bad as you expected it to be; but, at the same time, it was also true that no experience was ever as good as you hoped it might be.
Mackendrick turned and propped himself on one elbow. “What do you think we’ll find?”
“Well, we keep calling it a settlement. It certainly looked like one from the shots we’ve seen. Of course it’d be great to discover evidence of sentient life…” Even as he said the words, he hardly believed they would. “I really don’t know what to think until we reach our destination. I don’t want to hope for too much in case we find nothing at all.”
Mackendrick nodded. “Ten Lee? Any thoughts?”
“I cannot guess what we might find. Speculation is useless.” She paused, blinking down at her plate of half- eaten food. “I am pleased to be here. It is
Mackendrick raised his eyebrows and lay down again, staring up at the ceiling of the dome.
Bennett watched the strange woman as she prepared her mattress and settled herself upon it in the lotus position. She closed her eyes and made circles with her thumbs and index fingers, then seemed to slow her breathing. There were times when he felt in awe of Ten Lee Theneka, her composure and certainty of thought. He sometimes wondered if she regarded everyone around her as shallow, mere puppets of conditioning, jerking to the meretricious dance of life’s music.
He prepared for sleep, unrolling his mattress and lying down on his back. Mackendrick sat up, tipping a dozen small white pills into his shaking palm and swallowing them with a draught of water. There was something about watching someone taking their medication that filled Bennett with a sense of trespass. He recollected once or twice accidentally coming across Ella as she administered her own injections; he had always quickly retreated, as if the healing might in some way prove less efficacious if he was around to witness the ritual.
Surprisingly, he slept well that night. He awoke feeling refreshed and invigorated seven hours later. The milky light of Tenebrae filled the dome, along with the odour of freshly brewing coffee.
Mackendrick was kneeling before the microwave. “Breakfast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
Bennett sat up and stretched, peering around. “Where’s Ten?”
Mackendrick pointed through the wall of the dome. Ten Lee was a childishly small figure standing on a hillside fifty metres away, silhouetted against the light of the rising gas giant.
He felt a sudden pang of alarm at the sight of her. He looked around and saw her rifle lying beside her mattress.
“Is she safe out there alone?”
Without waiting for a reply he grabbed his rifle, found his boots and hurried from the dome. He was surprised at the quality of the air, how fresh it was despite the warmth, and scented with a perfume suggesting pine, but sharper. He jogged across the purple grass and climbed the hill to where Ten stood. The view was spectacular from the summit: the dwindling plain shimmered with haze in the light of Tenebrae, its girth straddling the entirety of the horizon.
“Ten!”
She turned and glanced at his pulser.
Bennett shrugged. “I don’t think you should be out here without this.”
He held up the rifle, but she ignored the gesture, took a deep breath and swept her gaze around the view, suggesting without words that he was being needlessly apprehensive.
He smiled. “Beautiful morning.”
She ignored the observation and said, “Have you thought about the SIH disc, Joshua?”
The question surprised him. He had wanted to let it ride, maybe assess how he felt about things later, at the end of the mission.
“I… no. That is, I know what I should do.”
She turned to him and stared. “Then do it.”
She opened her palm before him, and upon it was the small silver disc from the hologram module.
He regarded it for what seemed like minutes.
“Joshua, you must let go. Accept what happened. In letting go we free ourselves, open ourselves and admit that new experience is possible.”
“You don’t know what it is like to lose—”
She blinked at him. “Joshua, when I was eighteen I lost the man I loved. He was killed in the War of Independence. I know what it is like—”
“Is that why you… why you turned to religion? To get over the loss?”
“Of course not. I always believed in the Path. My belief helped me, when he died.”
“Have you had anyone since?”
“Not a lover,” she said. “A few casual encounters…” She smiled at him. “I am passing even beyond that, now. I need nothing, only the peace that meditation brings. Here, I feel as though I need only to meditate to be close to the essence.”
Bennett regarded her. She was still proffering the disc on the palm of her small hand. He thought of Ella, and then Julia, and then the other women he thought he had loved over the years.
“I wish I could do without people, Ten. They seem only to bring me pain.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps you seek too much in others, Joshua. Perhaps you seek that which they are not, instead of that which they are. Accept them for themselves, not that which you wish them to be.” She stared at him. “Now take the disc and throw it as far as you can.”
He realised that, if he hesitated any longer, he would disobey her command—and he knew that then he would hate himself.
On impulse he snatched the disc and drew back his arm. He launched the disc high, watched it go spinning through the air and catch the light once or twice, then fall on a long, slow arc into the valley bottom.
He thought of Ella, and felt a quick stab of guilt he knew to be irrational.
Briefly, in a gesture valuable because of its rarity, Ten Lee reached out and touched his hand. Then she left him and walked back down the hillside to the dome.
After a breakfast of coffee and fruit bread, taken outside the dome on the purple grass, they packed up and boarded the transporter on the final leg of the journey. Ten Lee drove and Bennett sat beside the open window next to Mackendrick.
They made good time as Tenebrae moved from west to east. It seemed less to rise than to roll with vast majesty across the valley. When Bennett tipped his head and stared through the roof of the vehicle, the giant filled his field of vision, blotting out the starfield and provoking a stifled sense of claustrophobia. Great flashes of lightning pulsed within the gaseous bands, sending floods of opal illumination across the plain before them.
They sighted more wildlife as the short day progressed. Ten Lee was the first to spot the flying creatures. She leaned forward, clasping the wheel in both hands, and peered through the windshield. “Look,” she said. “There. Straight ahead.”
At first they appeared as a flock of jet specks in the air at the far end of the plain. Seconds later they were overhead and silhouetted against the belly of the gas giant, creatures with sickle wings and great scythe-like beaks, not unlike pteranodons from the Cretaceous period. So vast was the flock that they took fully minutes to pass overhead.
“We can safely say it’s looking a viable habitat for fauna at the top end of the food chain,” Mackendrick commented. “I wonder what’s at the very top?”
His words set Bennett to seriously contemplating the possibility that a sentient alien lifeform might inhabit
