Foreigner

He sank down on his heels. There was no other way to hide in the barrenness the moon-folk had made, this bare-earth, lifeless sameness that extended the width of the valley around cold, square buildings painted the color of death, their corners in no auspicious alignment with the hills. He put his hands in front of his mouth to warm them, because the sinking of the sun chilled the air.

Or perhaps because the strangeness suddenly seemed overwhelming, and because he doubted he could go alive into that place so ominously painted and so glaringly, perhaps defiantly, misaligned to the earth—he began to be in dread of what he might find as their purpose, these folk who fell to Earth on petal sails.

II

«^»

The sun eclipsed by the planetary rim was a glorious sight from space, but a station-dweller saw it only from cameras and stored tape—while a planet-dweller saw it once a day, if he cared to go outside, or stop on his way back from work. And Ian Bretano still did care to, because it was still that new to him.

New and disorienting, if he fell to thinking about where he was on the planet… or where home was, or what it was or would be, for the rest of his life.

And sometimes, at night when the stars swung above the valley, sometimes when the moon was above the horizon line and all of space was over their heads, he missed the station desperately and asked himself for a wild, panicked moment why he had ever wanted to be down here at the bottom of a planetary well, why he’d ever left his family and his friends and why he couldn’t have contributed to the cause from the clean, safe laboratories upstairs—Upstairs, they all called it, now, having taken up the word from the first team down.

Upstairs—as if the station and safety and families and friends were still all as attainable as a ride in a lift.

But family and friends weren’t in their reach—wouldn’t be soon, nor might ever be, for all they could know. That was the gamble they had all taken, coming down here and subjecting themselves to unregulated weather and air so thin that just walking across the compound was strenuous exercise.

They’d acclimate to thinner air with no trouble, the medics claimed, they’d adjust—although a botanist who’d previously had mostly to do with algaes in convenient tanks and taxonomy in recorded text wasn’t sure that he was adequate to be a discoverer or a pioneer.

Still, for all of the discomforts there were compensations. Every specimen in the lab was a new species, the chemistry and the genetics was all to discover.

And for those of them who’d grown used to the day sky, and all that glowing, dust-diffracted blue space overhead, for those of them who had convinced their stomachs that they weren’t going to fall off the planet when they looked outward to the horizon—thank God for the hills around them, that gave the illusion of a positive, not a negative curvature—they could take deliberate chances with their stomachs, walk with their eyes on an opaque sky and watch the colors change behind the hills as the world turned its face to deep space.

Every evening and every morning brought new variations of weather and different shadows on the hills.

Weather and hills… words they’d learned in Earth Science, from photos that had never hinted at the transparencies of a worldly sky, or the coolth of a storm wind and the rushing sound it made in the grasses. He still found it unnerving that windows dared be so thin that thunder rattled them. He’d never realized that a cloud passing over the sun would cool the air so quickly. He’d never have guessed that storms had a smell. He’d never imagined the complexity of sound traveling across a landscape, or the smells, both pleasant and unpleasant—smells that might be more acute once his nose quit bleeding and his lungs quit aching.

He still found it hard to make the mental conversion from being on the station looking at tape of a planet he couldn’t touch, and being on the ground looking at a point of light he might never reach again.

It had been a hard good-bye, Upstairs. Parents, grandparents, friends… what could one say? He’d hugged them for what he knew might be the last time, in the lounge where the cameras weren’t allowed—and he’d been fine right down to the moment he’d seen his father’s expression, at which point his doubts had made a sudden lump in his throat and stayed there for the duration of the capsule ride, even after they had felt the parachute deploy.

“See you,” he’d said to them when he was leaving. “Five years. In five years, you’ll ride down.”