orange against a gray shield of ammonia-methane ice. These, too, were living creatures. Biological processes of some sort were taking place here, anabolism, catabolism, ingestion, respiration, reproduction, whatever. Living creatures, altogether different from those of Io and unutterably different from anything native to Earth.
Those two sets of alien splotches are still the only forms of extraterrestrial life that the human race has ever discovered, and the two men who found them stand face-to-face now in the control cabin of the
“We’ve been talking about the people who’ll be going on the landing party,” Huw says.
“There’s been no decision about a landing party,” the year-captain replies evenly.
“We can at least speculate about the makeup of the party.”
“You can at least do that. But we don’t have any assurance yet that we’ll want to make a landing at all.”
“If we do,” Huw says. “Let’s assume that much, shall we, old brother?”
“All right. If we make a landing, then.”
“If we do,” Huw says, “my feeling is that a group of three is our best bet: a biologist, a planetographer, and —”
The year-captain says, “Do I understand that you’re proposing yourself as a candidate for my job, Huw?”
Huw, bewildered, snakes his head. “Why do you say that?”
“Naming the landing party is my prerogative. Here you’ve already worked out the proper number of people to go, and, I assume, the names of the actual personnel as well. Captain’s work. All right: you want to be captain, Huw, you can be captain. We’ll call a ship assembly and I’ll nominate you as my successor, and then you can pick anybody you like to go down for a look at Planet A. Assuming that you regard it as desirable to make a landing in the first place.”
Huw is still shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand — I’m not trying to — I don’t want — I wouldn’t want—”
“To be captain?”
“Not at all. Not in the slightest bit. We both know that the captain can’t be part of the landing party. Listen, man, for Christ’s sake, I am not trying to usurp your captainly prerogatives and I most assuredly don’t want to be the next captain myself. I simply came down here to have a little preliminary discussion with you about the makeup of a possible landing party, and—”
“All right,” the year-captain says, as calmly as though they are discussing whether it is getting close to time for lunch. “So tell me who you think ought to be the ones to go.”
Huw, flustered and crimson-faced, says, “Why, you and me, of course. Me to drive the buggy, you to examine the biological situation. And Marcus or Innelda to work out the overall planetary analysis. That’s a big enough party to do the job, but not so big that we’d be putting an enormous proportion of the whole expedition at risk in one basket.”
The year-captain nods. But he says nothing. He sits there silently, inscrutable as ever. Perhaps he is considering the best reply to make to what Huw has said; perhaps he is simply sitting there with his mind blanked out in the proper Zen-monk fashion, allowing Huw to fidget. Indeed, Huw fidgets. Huw thinks he knows this man better than anyone else alive, and perhaps that is true. But, even so, he does not know him nearly well enough. He has transgressed on some inviolable boundary here, he realizes, but he is not sure what it is.
After a very long while the year-captain says, “You and me and Marcus. Or Innelda. All right. Certainly those are qualified personnel. And who is to become the next captain? Have you worked that out too?”
“Man, man, I don’t give a bloody damn who is captain! What I care about is the landing party! You and me, old brother, the way it was on Io, on Callisto, on Titan — !”
“Yes. You and me. And Marcus or Innelda. We agree on that. It’s a logical group, yes, Huw. But also we will need a new captain.” He smiles, but to Huw the smile seems no warmer than the landscape of Callisto or Ganymede. “We should hold the election immediately, I think. And then, once my successor is chosen, I’ll name the members of the landing party as my last act in office, and they will be the ones that you’ve proposed. You really want to go, do you, Huw?”
“Stop playing idiotic games with me. Of course I do!”
“Then find me a new year-captain,” the year-captain says.
At Lofoten I was taught how to put all vestiges of ego aside and live as a purely unattached entity, undistracted by irrelevant yearnings and schemes. And thereby to be a more perfect being, who will be more nearly likely to attain the dissolution of self that is the highest goal of the disciplined mind.
I absorbed the teachings fully, yes, I did, I did. Even though the nagging feeling remained in me that by trying to make myself perfectly unattached I was in fact acting out the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, because I was setting out to try to turn myself into a god, and what is that if not self-aggrandizement? I remember how my Preceptor smiled as I told him all that. Obviously he had been down the same path himself. It was, he said, the paradox of striving toward unstrivingness, a circular trap, and there was no way out of it except right through the middle of it. Scheme as hard as you can to free yourself of the need for scheming. Drive yourself ever onward toward liberation from the slavery of goals. Exert merciless self-discipline in the pursuit of freedom from compulsive achievement.
Well, so be it, I told myself. You are an imperfect being seeking to follow a course of perfection, and it’s altogether likely that you’ll hit a few problems along that way. I did my best, given the inherent limitations of the material I was required to work with, and by and large I think that the Lofoten experience got me closer to whatever it is that I’m searching for than anything I had previously done. But look at me now! Oh, just look! Where is all my nonattachment? Where is my freedom from fruitless and distracting striving?
I want to be part of the team that lands on Planet A.
I want it desperately. Desperately.
I feel excitement gathering in me night and day as we get closer to that place. I feel it in my fingertips, in my throat, in my chest, in my balls. A new world! The new world, for all we know! If it is to be the place where we build our settlement, then the first ones of us who set foot on it will become figures of myth in millennia to come, culture-heroes, even gods. Do I want my remote descendants to think of me as a god? Apparently I do. Oh, Lofoten, Lofoten, you seem even farther away than you actually are! All those salutary plunges into icy pools, all that naked sprinting through the snow, all the fasting, all the meditation, the focusing of the mind on that clear white light, and yet here I am hungry for godhood, and how idiotic it is, how contemptible, how absurd. Yet undeniable. I want to go down there.
Which means I must find someone to replace me as captain. But who? Who? No one is stepping forward. No one seems even remotely interested. They are quite content to let me remain in the job. Like sheep, all of them, and none wants to be shepherd in my place. I should have thought of all this when I first let myself in for this year- captain business. Perhaps I did; perhaps I thought that it would be just another valuable spiritual discipline for me, to take on the responsibility of running the ship. Perhaps I had in mind, even, the great increment of virtue that would accrue to me by denying myself the right to be part of an exploring party. Certainly I’m capable of such nonsense. And now I have trapped myself in it.
Noelle reports that the transmission difficulties she has been experiencing in recent weeks have seemingly cleared up during the course of our move to this sector of space. Perhaps her “sunspot” theory really was correct, and some wholly local force was filling her mind with static back there. We’ll see. It’s a positive development, anyway, and those are always welcome. She still seems very tense and strange, though. Sits there in the lounge half the day and half the night, playing Go as though playing Go is the most important thing in the universe, taking on all corners and beating them with the greatest of ease. What a mystery that woman is! In this ship of strange creatures she is surely the strangest by some distance.
Unless Paco has botched his calculations, we are just a few days away now from the vicinity of Planet A. Given the uncertainties of my own situation, I find myself half hoping that the place will be so obviously unsuitable for colonization that we won’t even want to take an exploratory look at it. But that’s contemptible idiocy. Ten to one we’ll be sending a team down to prowl around. Huw, certainly. And Innelda, I think. And — me? That remains to be seen, I guess. The extent of my fear that I won’t be eligible to go is a good measure of the failure of my Lofoten training, and my anxiety level in that area is, well, embarrassingly high.
