Starborne

Unlike the year-captain, who has chosen to reinvent himself every ten or twelve years with an entirely new career, Huw has devoted himself single-mindedly to planetary reconnaissance since he was a very young man. He is by nature an explorer. Some vagrant gene in his makeup has sparked an insatiable curiosity in him, not at all typical of his era: he seeks to move outward, ever outward, journeying through the realms of the universe, seeing everything that is there to be seen. The moons and planets in the vicinity of Earth first, of course. But it had always been his intention to be part of the first interstellar mission, which was already in the planning stages before he was born, and so he has spent his life designing, building, and testing equipment for use in the exploration of unfamiliar environments. Huw is a descendant, so he likes to claim, of Prince Madoc of Wales, who in the twelfth century set out with two hundred followers westward into the Atlantic and came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. And returned to Wales and recruited colonists, and went back to the land on the far side of the Atlantic to found a settlement of God-fearing Welshmen in the New World and to convert the Aztecs and other heathen to Christianity.

Was it so? Of course it was, Huw would say. The account of Madoc’s voyage was right there in the chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarfan, theHistorie of Cambria, now called Wales, and who was he to call the learned Caradoc a liar? It was well known, Huw would tell you, it was a fact beyond question, that certain Aztec words were much like Welsh, and that Indians as far north as the Great Plains had been found to be speaking the pure Welsh tongue like true Silurians when the later European explorers arrived. And did Madoc’s blood truly run in Huw Morgan’s veins? Who could say it did not? There wasn’t a Welshman alive who couldn’t trace his ancestry, one way or another, to the glorious kings of olden days, and Madoc had been one of the greatest of those kings: there was no questioning of that.

And so this jovial ruddy-faced son of Madoc had gone up from the green and placid precincts of happy Earth to ride in a silver bullet across the sun-blasted plains of Mercury, he had prowled the parched wastelands of Mars, he had risked even the corrosive atmosphere of Venus. He was a designer and builder of the equipment that protected him, the sealed and armored land-rovers, the doughty spacesuits. When he was done with Venus the moons of the outer worlds attracted him. Outward, ever outward: and it was on Ganymede of Jupiter that his path and that of the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan first intersected.

They knew of each other, of course. Earth’s population in these latter days was so small, and the number of those of their particular cast of mind so few, that they could hardly not have heard of each other. But even a small world like Earth is quite big enough for two roving men to move about freely without bumping into one another, especially if they are periodically making excursions to adjacent planets.

Lifewas what the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan was looking for. Not his own life; he had already found that, knew precisely where its center was located. But life outside himself, far outside, the life of other worlds. Mercury had none: the sun had baked it clean in the horrific intervals of daylight between the long spells of terrible night. The hidden landscape of Venus was too difficult to explore with any thoroughness, though it was not beyond hope that some organisms comfortable in blast-furnace heat under a carbon-dioxide sky might have evolved there. Still, none could be found. And on Mars — grim, red, dusty Mars — microfossils four billion years old spoke of ancient bacteria and protozoa, but it did not seem as if they had left any living descendants on that harsh and uninviting world.

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn, though — Io, Callisto, Iapetus. Titan, Ganymede—

“I’m going to Ganymede to look for microbes,” the man who would be year-captain said, five minutes after his first meeting with Huw. “Build me an ice-sled and a proton-storm suit. And come with me.”

They were very different kinds of men. Huw, cheerful and outgoing and exuberant, was surprised to find himself drawn so strongly to someone so remote, inaccessible, unsympathetic. It was the attraction of opposites, perhaps. They were mirror images of one another. And yet they wanted the same thing.