Starborne

other things. What danger can there be in that?”

“Marcus is dead now.”

“Not from breathing the air,” says Huw. But after a couple of further inhalations he fastens his faceplate again. His sampling of the atmosphere of Planet A leaves an unpleasant chemical aftertaste in his nostrils and throat, but he suspects that there’s little significance to that, if any: for all he knows, it’s mere imagination, just another of Planet A’s cheery psychic tricks, one more turn of the screw.

They are here to explore. So they dutifully walk around a little, fifty meters this way, thirty the other. Giovanna prods at the sandy soil and discovers a colony of shining, metallic-looking insects just below the surface, and they occupy her scientific curiosity for a minute or two.

But it is only too obvious that the same malaise of soul is afflicting them here as on the other continent. Huw keeps watching the sky for monsters; Giovanna is unable to focus her concentration very long on her investigations. The same fidgety fitfulness is afflicting them both, though neither has admitted it to the other yet. Whatever the effect is, it doesn’t seem to be a phenomenon confined to a single locality, not if two random landings have produced the same results, but must emanate from the core of this world to its entire surface.

Huw looks toward Giovanna. She is outwardly calm, but her face is pale, sweat-shiny. Evidently she, like him, has already learned some techniques for holding Planet A’s terrors at bay; but clearly it is as much of a full-time struggle for her as it is for him. A planet where you are always thirty seconds away from a wild shriek of horrible baseless fear is not a wise place to choose for mankind’s second home.

“It’s no good,” he says. “We might as well clear out of here.”

“Yes. We might as well.”

They return to the ship. Marcus, unsurprisingly, is right where they left him in his acceleration chair. To find him anywhere else would have been real occasion for shock, and yet Huw is unable to avoid wincing as he sees the strapped-in corpse lying there. Giovanna, coming in behind him, appears to avert her eyes from the sight of Marcus as she enters her chair.

“Well?” she asks, as Huw starts setting up flight instructions. “Do we try one more time somewhere else?”

“No,” says Huw. “Enough is enough.”

The year-captain says, “You think it’s absolutely hopeless, then? That we wouldn’t ever get used to the mental effects?”

Huw spreads his thick-fingered hands out before him, studying their fleshy tips rather than looking up at the other man. This is the third day since Huw’s return to the starship. He and Giovanna have just emerged from postmission quarantine, after a thorough checkout to ascertain whether they have picked up potentially troublesome alien microorganisms down below.

“I can’t say that we wouldn’tever get used to them,” he tells the year-captain. “How could I know that? In five hundred years, a thousand, we might come to love them. We might miss all that stomach-turning disorientation if it were suddenly taken away. But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“It’s hard for me to understand how a planet could possibly put forth a psychic effect so powerful that —”

“It’s hard for me to understand it too, old brother. But I felt it, and it was real, and like nothing I had ever felt in my life. A force, a power, acting on my mind. As though there’s some physical feature down there that has the property of working as a giant amplifier, maybe, and setting up feedback loops within the nervous system of any complex organism. I’m not saying that that’s what it actually is, you understand. I’m simply telling you that the effect isthere, for whatever reason, and it makes your flesh crawl. Mademy flesh crawl. Made Giovanna’s flesh crawl. Sent Marcus into such wild panic that he lost his mind completely. Of course, as I say, there’s always a chance that we could learn to live with it after a while. The human species is very adaptable that way. But would youwant to live with it? What sort of price would we have to pay for living with it, eh, captain?”

The year-captain, monitoring Huw’s facial expressions and vocal inflections with great care, is grateful that he had had someone like Huw available to send on this mission. Huw is probably the most stable man on board, and certainly the most fearless, though it has crossed the year-captain’s mind that noisy, blustering Paco runs him a close second. Huw has been shaken deeply by the landing on Planet A: no question of that. And it isn’t simply Marcus’s death that has affected Huw so deeply. The planet itself seems to be the problem. The planet must be intolerable.

It is a matter of some regret to the year-captain that Planet A isn’t going to be suitable. He wants the expedition quickly to find a place where it can settle, before their long confinement aboard the Wotan starts creating debilitating psychological effects. And he is sorry that he will not get a chance to explore Planet A’s surface himself, awful though the place seems to be. But the intense negativity of Huw’s report leaves him no choice but to write Planet A off and get the starship heading out on the next leg of its quest.

He has said none of this aloud, though. Huw, left waiting for the year-captain to reply to his last statement, eventually speaks up again himself. “It’s a lousy world for us in any case, you know. Parts of it are dry and other parts are even drier. We’d have a tough time with agriculture, and there doesn’t seem to be any native livestock at all. We—”

“Yes. All right, Huw. We aren’t going to settle there.”

Huw’s taut face seems to break up in relief, as though he had privately feared that the year-captain was going to insist on a colonizing landing despite everything. “Damn right we aren’t,” he says. “I’m glad you agree with me on that.” The two men stand. They are of about the same height, the year-captain maybe a centimeter or two taller, but Huw is twice as sturdy, a good forty kilos heavier. He catches the year-captain in a fierce bear-hug. “I had a very shitty time down there, old brother,” Huw says softly into the year-captain’s ear.

“I know you did,” says the year-captain. “Come. We’re going to hold a memorial service for Marcus now.”

The year-captain isn’t looking forward to this. He had never expected such a thing to be part of his captainly responsibilities, and he has no very clear idea of what he is going to say. But it seems to be necessary to say something. The people of the Wotan have taken Marcus’s death very heavily indeed.

It isn’t that Marcus was such a central member of the society that the members of the expedition have constructed. He was quiet, maybe a little shy, generally uncommunicative. At no time had he been part of the contingent ofGo players, nor had he sought to establish any sort of regular mating relationship aboard the ship. He had had brief unstructured liaisons, the captain knows, with Celeste and Imogen and Natasha, and possibly some others, but he had, so it seemed, always preferred to remain in the little pool of a dozen or so voyagers who avoided any kind of formal extended sexual involvement with one particular person.

No, it is simply the fact that Marcus is dead, rather than that he figured in any large way in the social life of the ship, that has stirred them all so deeply. They had been fifty; now they are forty-nine; their very first venture outside the sealed enclosure that is the starship had afflicted them with a subtraction. That is a grievous wound. And then, too, there is the unbalance to reckon with. There will not now be twenty-five neatly deployed couples when the engendering of children begins. Whether the voyagers would indeed have clung to the old bipolar traditions of marriage on the new Earth is not something that the year-captain or anyone else knows at this time, of course. Those traditions have long been in disarray on Earth, and there is no necessary reason for reviving them in their ancient strict formality out among the stars. But now it is quite certain that some variation from tradition is going to be required eventually, because ideally everyone will be expected to play an active role in populating the new world, or so the general assumption goes at this point, and now it will be impossible to match every woman of the expedition with one and only one man. That may be a problem, eventually. But the real problem is that the people of the Wotan had come to feel that they were living a life outside all mortality, here within this machine that floats silently across space at unthinkable velocities, and that sweet illusion had been shattered the very first time a few of them had emerged from their ark.

It was Julia who suggested to the year-captain that a memorial service would be a good idea. A general catharsis, a public act of healing — that was what was needed. Everyone is stunned at the death, but some — Elizabeth, Althea, Jean-Claude, one or two others — seem altogether devastated. Bodies are self-healing these