Interstellar

Mann pointed at the thrust nozzle in his elbow joint.

“Charged?” he asked. Cooper double-checked and gave him a thumbs up.

Without further hesitation, they set off. After a few moments, the lander passed over them, with Case at the controls. Cooper reached up and keyed his long-range transmitter.

“A little caution, Case?” he said.

“Safety first, Cooper,” Case shot back.

Cooper and Mann tracked on over the sculpted ice, the surface grinding beneath their boots.

Cooper had changed his mind about Mann’s world as he got to know it better. It was nothing like any place on Earth. Where they now walked, the clouds were no longer white, but rather a sort of charcoal color, as if they were frozen thunderheads. Of course, he knew that the color came from minerals frozen in the ice, and there were probably places on Earth with similar dirty snow. But nowhere on his home planet did any glacier rise into such strange configurations, spreading in the sky above, dropping off into blue darkness below, winding into formations like gigantic, frozen worms.

After a time they came to an edge, and a drop of about fifty feet.

“Just take it gently,” Mann said, stepping off the cliff. The jets at his elbows flared, slowing him so he landed with a light thump instead of a splat. A little less sure of himself, Cooper followed.

The lighter gravity made everything seem a little dreamlike, even in the heavy suit. Acceleration didn’t feel quite right, nor did the kick of his thrusters when he fired them. Evolution had built his brain for thirty-two feet per second per second, and that wasn’t how physics played here.

He landed in a massive canyon of ice. Beautiful, as Mann had said, but also daunting. It made him feel insignificant. Gazing at the wind-sculpted walls, he wondered how old the ice was, what forces other than wind had shaped it. What the unseen surface below was like. Mann said there was air present, and organics, but with this superstrata of frozen clouds it was going to be dark, wasn’t it? And cold, probably much colder than up above.

He imagined the plan B kids, born into that dark, icy world. Romilly and Brand would tell tales of a warmer, sunnier place, but in a few generations those stories would be forgotten, and permanent night and winter would be all they would know.

Was this what “they” had planned? Their mysterious benefactors who scribbled coordinates with gravity?

Somehow it didn’t seem like enough.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t dark down there—maybe the ice splintered the light into constant rainbows, and geothermal forces created hot spots as comfortable as any tropical paradise. Mann seemed confident enough in the place.

Anyway, it was almost out of his hands now. He was nearly quit of plan B.

Then he realized Mann was talking to him.

“Brand told me why you feel you have to go back,” he said.

Cooper set his feet. He’d been afraid of this.

“If this little excursion is about trying to change my mind,” he said, “let’s turn around right now.”

“No,” Mann assured him. “I understand your position.”

He turned and continued walking.

Still a little suspicious, Cooper followed.

“You have attachments,” Mann went on. “I’m not supposed to, but even without family, I can promise you that the yearning to be with other people is massively powerful. Our instincts, our emotions, are at the foundations of what makes us human. They’re not to be taken lightly.”

A wind whipped down the canyon, gusting ice crystals between them.

* * *

After introducing Getty to Lois and Coop, Murph slipped upstairs to her old bedroom. Part of her was almost afraid of what she might see there, of the memories it would stir. She knew, though… she knew that this was where it started, that there was something this place could tell her.

Had been waiting to tell her.

After a little pause, she opened the door.

“Mama lets me play in here.”

She realized with a start that Coop had followed her. The boy pointed to a box on one of the shelves.

“I didn’t touch your stuff,” he said, with the over-earnestness of a child who wasn’t telling the truth.

It didn’t matter, of course. She didn’t have any use for whatever was there, did she? If she had, she would have taken it long ago.

* * *

As Amelia watched the lander descend, she felt a sense of finality come over her, a door closing forever, or like—what was the old expression? As if she was burning the bridge behind her. This was really it. She was going to spend the rest of her life here, watching over plan B, rearing children who would never know any other mother than her, no fathers other than Mann or Romilly.

Cooper was going—and with him all hope for Wolf.

Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? she asked the mute ghost of her father. Why didn’t you trust even me? But what would she have done with that knowledge? Would she have warned Cooper away? Without him, they would never have gotten this far. Would she have been able to lie to him, in the name of the greater good?

Maybe.