Starborne

days, up to a point; minds, less so. Since the return of the landing party Leon has been dispensing psychoactive drugs to those in need of chemical therapy; Edmund, Alberto, Maria, and Noori, all of whom have some gift for counseling, are making their help available to the sorely troubled; the year-captain has even, to his great surprise, seen the usually uninvolved Noelle embracing a weeping, shaky Elizabeth in the baths, tenderly stroking Elizabeth’s shoulders as she sobs. Some communal acknowledgment of their general bereavement may be the best way of putting the matter to rest, Julia thought, and the year-captain agrees.

Everyone gathers at the usual place for a general assembly, and the year-captain puts his back against the usual bulkhead, facing them all.

He finds it difficult, at first, to locate the proper words. It is not a matter of stage fright — he of all people wouldn’t worry about that — but rather of a sense of inadequacy, of fundamental awkwardness. The year-captain’s dispassionate nature is perhaps not the one best suited, aboard this ship, for the task at hand. But he is the captain, chosen overwhelmingly by their vote at the time of departure, and ratified again a year after that. He is the one who must speak to this issue.

“Friends—” he begins, as his hesitation begins to pass from him. Every face is turned toward him. “Friends, we are all greatly wounded by the loss of Marcus, and now we must all pray for healing. But where do we turn when we go to pray? To whom do we address our prayers? We are a race that has outlived its gods. We are proud, I think, that we are beyond all superstition, that we live in a realm of the altogether tangible, the accurately measurable. But yet — yet — at a time like this—”

They are staring at him intently. Wondering where he’s heading, perhaps.

“Marcus is dead, and no words will bring him back. Prayer itself, even if there were gods and the gods were listening to us, would not be capable of doing that. If there are gods, then it was the will of the gods that Marcus be gathered to them, and we would have no choice but to bend to that will. And if, as we are all so confident, there are no gods—”

He pauses. He looks from one to another to another, from Heinz to Huw to Paco, from Elizabeth to Noelle to Celeste, looks at Leila, looks at Roy, Zena, seeking for signs of restlessness, puzzlement, irritation. But no. No. He has their attention completely.

“In ancient times,” he goes on, “this might have been easier for us. We would have said it was the will of the gods, or the will of some particular god, perhaps, that Marcus should die young in a strange and hostile place, and then we would have gone on about our work, secure in the knowledge that the workings of the gods are so mysterious that we need not seek explanations for them beyond the circular one that says that what has happened was fated to be. That was in a simpler era. We modern folk have dispensed with gods; we are left with the problem of finding our own explanations, or of living without explanations entirely. I urge the latter choice on you.

“Marcus’s death was an accident. It needs no explanation. There have always been risks in any venture of exploration, and even though most of the human race has forgotten that, we of all people should keep it constantly in mind. Courageously Marcus came out here to the stars with us to help in the task of finding a new home for the human race. Courageously he went down with Giovanna and Huw to the surface of the world we see out there; and there he encountered a force too strong for him to understand or handle, and it destroyed him. So be it. The simplest explanation is the best one here. Humanity is no longer, in general, a risk-taking race. But we are the exceptions. We fifty human beings have chosen to revive the willingness to take risks that most of us have lost. Marcus is only the first victim of that willingness. He is gone, and we mourn his loss. We mourn that loss because he was young, someone who had great contributions to make in the world we will someday build and who will not now make those contributions; and because he has been deprived of knowing the joy that the fulfillment of our mission ultimately will bring us; and because he was one of us. Mainly, I think, we mourn him because he was one of us.

“But is that a reason to mourn, really? Hestill is one of us. He always will be. As we go onward among the stars, to Planet B and Planet C and, if necessary, Planets X and Y and Z and beyond, we will carry Marcus with us — the memory of Marcus — the first of our martyrs, the first to give his life in this great quest on which we all are bound. It wasnecessary for some of us to go down to the surface of that planet. Marcus went. Marcus died. He was performing his function as one of us, and he died because of it. Others of us, I very much suspect, will meet with similar fates as this voyage goes along. So be it. We willingly embraced all risks when we left home and friends and family and world behind to undertake this voyage across the universe. We gave up the assurance of a long and safe and comfortable life on Earth in return for the rewards — and perils — of a venture such as no human beings have ever undertaken before. And as our work unfolds, we are not likely, any of us, to find it altogether comfortable, and certainly not very safe.

“So Marcus is dead, much too soon. So be it. So be it. He is beyond all pain now, beyond all uncertainties and insufficiencies, all knowledge of failure and defeat now. In that we should find comfort. But also we must see to it, friends — for our own sakes, not his — that Marcus’s death was not without purpose. We must go on, and on and on and on if need be, from one end of the cosmos to the other, if we must, to find the world that we are to settle. And when we get there — and wewill get there — we must see to it that our children and our children’s children remember always the name of Marcus, the first of the martyrs of our enterprise, who gave his life so that their world could be. When we write the histories of our voyage, the name of Marcus will be written in letters of fire. We will make Marcus immortal that way. As all of us will be immortal — glorious figures of myth, demigods, even gods, perhaps — in the minds of the people of that new world. We who are without gods to pray to ourselves will become gods, I think, to the settlers of the new Earth of the years to come. Immortal gods, all of us. And Marcus has simply entered his immortality earlier than the rest of us, that’s all.”

Again he pauses. Looks from face to face. Too grand? he wonders. Too high-flown?

But everyone is utterly silent and still; everyone’s eyes are on him, even the blind eyes of Noelle. He has captured them. As in the old days, the Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. Yes. A successful performance, one of his best. Perhaps even accomplishing something useful.

Good. Quit while you’re ahead, he thinks.

He says in a different tone of voice, a sudden downward shift of rhetorical intensity, “One thing more, and then we’ll break this up. This afternoon we’ll begin calculating the course for our next shunt, which will take us — what is it, Hesper, eighty light-years? ninety? — to another possible colony-world. Actual departure time will be announced later. Naturally, I have no idea whether this second destination is going to work out any better than the first one did. We’re simply going to go out there and have a look, just as we did here. At this point we have no particular expectations, one way or the other. Of course, I hope that it’s the world we’re seeking, and I know you all feel the same way. But there are others waiting to be explored beyond that one, if need be, and, if need be, we will go onward until we find what we want. I thank you all for listening. Meeting dismissed.”

Paco, Hesper, Julia, Sieglinde, Roy, and Heinz begin the process of working out the course that will take the Wotan to Planet B. The year-captain goes off with Noelle to send the communique to Earth that will report on the failure of the mission to Planet A and the death of Marcus.

He is worried about the effect that such news will have on the people of Earth. The people of Earth are accustomed to success. For them, he thinks, this voyage is a sort of fairy-tale adventure, and fairy tales are supposed to have benign outcomes, even though the occasional wicked witch may be met with along the way. The fact that one of the adventurers has actuallydied from his encounter with some dark magical force may not fit the pattern that they expect to be enacted out here. They may insulate themselves from further jolts, he fears, by retreating from their Interest in the Wotan’s voyage, by decoupling themselves entirely from their involvement in the enterprise.

Still, they have to be told. It would be wrong to withhold the truth from them. They know that a planetary landing has been made; they must be allowed to know the outcome of it.

“How is transmission quality today?” he asks Noelle.

“Some interference. Not too serious.”

“All right, then. Are you ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing personnel … deplorable fatal accident … immediate withdrawal from planetary surface … abandonment of exploration effort … It’s all true, but