Starborne

“It wasn’t in any danger,” the year-captain murmurs.

“The bug didn’t know that.”

“No. No. The bug didn’t know.” The year-captain, shaken, nudges the fragments of the thing with the boot of one toe. “I’ve never killed anything before,” he says. “A mosquito, maybe. A spider. But not something like this.”

“You had no choice,” Huw says. “Two seconds more and it would have been going for your throat.”

The year-captain acknowledges that.

“Anyway, it was very damned ugly, old brother.”

“It may have been an intelligent life-form,” says the year-captain. “At the very least, a highly developed one. In any case, it belongs here and we don’t.” His voice is thick with anger and disgust.

He pauses beside the dead creature a little while longer. Then he turns and walks slowly from the tunnel.

Huw follows him out. For a little while they stand together outside the entrance, saying nothing, watching the viscous rain come down in thick looping sheets.

“Would you like to collect a couple of those eggs to take back to the ship for study?” Huw asks finally, goading just a little, but in what he wants to think is a pleasant way, trying to ease the tension of the moment.

The year-captain does not answer immediately.

“No,” he says at last. “I think not.”

“But the eternal quest of science, old brother, does it not require us to—”

“Let the eternal quest of science be damned just this once,” the year-captain tells him sharply. There is a sudden explosive note of anger just barely under control in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s just get ourselves back to the ship.”

This heat, this tone of fury being held in check with great difficulty, is altogether out of character for him. Huw gives him a quick look of surprise verging on alarm. Then, by way of defusing the situation, he lets out a long comic exhalation of relief. “And are we truly going from here, then? Oh, praises be to all the gods! I thought you would keep us poking about in this filthy place forever, my friend.”

Zed Hesper, of course, has the tempting Planet C to propose to them, and plenty of others beyond that.

The sky is full of worlds, Hesper’s instruments indicate, and he is as eager as ever for them to go zooming off in quest of them.

But the first two adventures in planetary exploration have been less than rewarding, in fact have been a bit on the crushing side — one world sending out a broadcast in the psychotic part of the spectrum and the next one populated entirely by loathsome monsters — and in the aftermath of the most recent landing a strange dark mood of negativity is emerging for the first time aboard the  Wotan. The loss of contact with Earth — those chatty little bulletins from home, those trifling reminders that they once hadhad a home other than this wandering starship — has had something to do with that. And the voyagers have seen Huw and Giovanna come back pale and shaken from one planet, and Huw and the year-captain equally shaken from another. The effect on the year-captain in particular of the visit to the appalling Planet B is only too apparent even several days after his return, and it disturbs everyone to see that normally impassive man looking so rattled.

The horror that Planet B has turned out to be, after the great expectations that they had all allowed themselves to foster for it, has indeed taken a terrible toll, and not just on the two men who experienced that horror at close range.

It is suddenly occurring to those on the Wotan — many of them, at any rate — that after having left the predictability and comfort of Earth behind for the sake of undertaking a great exploit, they are faced now with the possibility of touring the galaxy forever without finding a world that can become a tolerable home for them. And the wildness of the thing they have volunteered to do, the utter fantastic gamble that it is, has begun to oppress their souls. They are afraid now, many of them, that they have simply thrown away their lives.

The year-captain struggles to transcend this bleak mood in himself, so that he will be better able to purge it from the others. But the sights and sounds of Planet B haunt him day and night, and they engulf him in a dire morass of melancholy. An entire world so hopelessly dismal: it is enough to make one deny the existence of the Creator, assuming one believed in Him in the first place. What divine purpose could have been served by the creation of a planet of endless rain, of titanic vines that constrict and strangle every hectare of the place, colossal brainless worms that feed on the vines, diabolic parasitic bugs that feed on the worms? No doubt it is the best of all possible worlds for the vines and the worms and the jewel-eyed bugs. But such objectivity is beyond him just now. He feels as though he has made a little excursion into some hitherto unrecorded subsidiary circle of Dante’s own Hell.

He yearns to speak with the Abbot about Planet B, if only he could. He hungers for the few quick acerbic sentences that would demolish all the darkness that clings to him now.

But the Abbot is beyond his reach. And so, very gradually, over a period of days, the year-captain manages to pull himself up out of the slough of despond without the aid of the Abbot’s direct intervention. There is no other course that he can allow himself to take.

Some of the others, primarily Hesper and Paco and Julia and Huw and even Sieglinde, have been able to retain their optimistic outlook toward the expedition despite the sobering outcome of the Planet B event. “The remarkable thing isn’t that the first two landings failed,” Julia says. “The remarkable thing is that we found two worlds that were worth checking out within the first couple of years of the voyage.”

“Hear, hear,” Huw bellows, as Huw likes to do. Huw knows that much depends now on his show of hearty high spirits and indomitable will, and he makes sure that he is never seen to be anything but his usual stalwart self, even after all that he has observed and felt on Planet A and the very different but equally oppressive Planet B. There is a price for this. He is willing to pay it.

But there are some aboard who have become deeply bemired in funk. These are the ones who had chosen, for whatever reason, to put a great many emotional chips down on the success of the Planet B mission, and were devastated by the spectacular failure of their wagers. Elizabeth is part of this group, and Imogen, and Sylvia, and several of the men: Roy, Elliot, Chang, Jean-Claude. Among these, who now spend most of their time atGo in the gaming lounge, there has begun to be some talk of giving up the voyage entirely, of swinging around and heading back to Earth.

“Don’t be idiots,” Paco says. “I can’t even imagine creeping back there.”

“You can’t imagine it,” says Elliot. “But I can.”

Elliot’s specialty is urban planning; it is Elliot who will design the future extraterrestrial settlements that the Wotan people hope to found. Since the Planet B fiasco he has convinced himself that he will never get a chance to practice his profession among these alien worlds, that the enterprise on which they all are bound is quixotic and foolish. Marcus’s death has affected Elliot deeply; so has the loss of contact with Earth.

Paco says to him, “If you want to go back, Elliot, why don’t you go? Maybe Huw will let you have one of the drone probes, and you can ride back to Earth in that. You and whoever else wants to go home. It’ll take you about three hundred years, give or take five or six, but if you’re as homesick as all that you won’t mind waiting a—”

“Stop it, Paco,” Elizabeth says.

Paco turns to her. “You’d like to go with him, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s fine with me. I’ll even calculate the course for you, if you like.” The Paco-Heinz-Elizabeth triad has just about collapsed in recent weeks; Heinz has been sleeping in a random, intermittent way with Jean-Claude and sometimes with Leila; and Paco, though he still spends some of his nights with Elizabeth and the occasional one with Heinz, has drifted off into a collateral entanglement with Giovanna. “Here,” Paco says, grabbing Elizabeth roughly and shoving her against Elliot. “She’s all yours. My blessings.”

Elliot is so annoyed that he pushes her back. Heinz gathers Elizabeth up as she rebounds from Elliot and tucks her against the side of his chest. To Paco he says quietly, “Can you try to calm down a little?”

“I hate all this talk of giving up and going back to Earth. It’s completely insane.”

“Is it, now?” Roy asks, looking up from the game ofGo he is playing with Noelle. He