Starborne

The year-captain relives, for the moment, those Lofoten days. The jagged chain of bleak rocky islands, rising like the spines of some submerged dinosaur’s enormous back from the sea off Norway’s fjord-sundered northwest coast. A stark landscape here. The dark, stormy Vestfjord that separated them from the mainland. The white-covered alpine peaks towering steeply in the background, a wall of wrinkled granite. The sparse grassy patches; the sodden cranberry moors; the broad ominous breast of the Atlantic curving off toward the west. Once these had been fishing islands, but the swarms of silvery cod were long extinct, and so were the fishing villages that had harvested the abundant catch. Mostly the islands were empty now, except for the one where the monastery sat, a neat row of stone buildings a short way inland from the sea.

The Gulf Stream flows here; the climate is harsh but not as extreme as the Arctic location might suggest. After Ganymede and Io and Callisto and Titan, these Lofoten islands might seem almost like paradise. There are no cranberry bogs on Ganymede. There are no grassy patches. One would derive no spiritual benefit from thrusting one’s bare hands into the waters of one of Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, only a quick death. It was after his final excursion to the moons of Saturn that he had entered the monastery, leaving Huw to reap the glory of their exploit all alone. Returning from Saturn, he had felt a need to — was it to flee the society of his fellow humans? No, not flee, exactly, but certainly to withdraw from it, to go to some quiet place where he could reflect on the things he had seen and learned, the prevalence of living things in places like Titan and Io, the stubbornness of the life-force in the face of the most hostile of surroundings. What, if anything, did that stubbornness mean? What kind of ticking mechanism was this universe, and what forces had set it going? He didn’t really expect answers to those questions; he wasn’t entirely sure that answers were what he was really looking for. He wanted simply to ask the questions over and over again, and to discover, perhaps, some pattern of meaning thatconnected, rather than “answered,” them. Lofoten was there and available to him; Lofoten was suddenly irresistible. So it was to Lofoten he went — he was Scandinavian himself, and had always known of the place; going there was like coming home, only more so — and it was on Lofoten that he stayed, going down to the icy sea to clarify his mind by numbing his hands, until at last the enterprise of the starship beckoned to him and he knew he had to move on.

The Abbot had known it even before he had. “I have come to request permission to leave,” he had said, and the Abbot, smiling a smile as cool and remote as the light of the farthest galaxies, had said, “Yes, it is the time when you must carry us to the stars, is that not so?”

Huw says, “We’ll go down and take a look at it, won’t we?” And then, when the year-captain remains silent: “Won’t we?”

The Wotan has made the shunt out of nospace successfully once again, and Julia has executed the appropriate braking maneuvers, and now the starship hangs in orbit a couple of million kilometers above the surface of the second world of this nameless K-type sun’s solar system. For three days they have been studying the characteristics of that world via the ship’s instruments. Huw and the year-captain are looking at it now, a furry gray-white sphere centered perfectly in the view-plate. A planet-shaped blanket of thick cloud, with a planet hiding behind it.

What kind of planet, though?

“We have to go down and give it the old once-over, don’t you think?” Huw asks. There is something of a touch of desperation in his voice. The year-captain has been at his most opaque today, his inner feelings as thoroughly shrouded as the surface of that planet in the viewplate.

Once again Hesper’s long-range calculations have been miraculously confirmed by direct instrument scan. It has turned out to be the case that Planet B is somewhat larger in diameter than Earth but has very similar gravitation, and that its atmospheric composition is 22 percent oxygen and 70.5 percent nitrogen and 4.5 percent water vapor, which is a lot, along with a hefty, though not unmanageable, 1.75 percent CO₂and assorted minor quantities of methane and various inert gases. That suggests a steamy tropical climate, and indeed the instrument scan has revealed that the mean temperature of this Planet B varies scarcely a degree from pole to pole: it is uniformly hot, a sweaty 45 degrees Celsius everywhere. A jungle world. Plenty of vegetation, photosynthesizing that lofty tonnage of CO₂like crazy. The good old Mesozoic, waiting for them down there.

No visual evidence of cities or towns. No electromagnetic output anywhere along the spectrum from gammas up to the longest radio waves and beyond. Nobody home, apparently.