Starborne

“Naming the landing party is my prerogative. Here you’ve already worked out the proper number of people to go, and, I assume, the names of the actual personnel as well. Captain’s work. All right: you want to be captain, Huw, you can be captain. We’ll call a ship assembly and I’ll nominate you as my successor, and then you can pick anybody you like to go down for a look at Planet A. Assuming that you regard it as desirable to make a landing in the first place.”

Huw is still shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand — I’m not trying to — I don’t want — I wouldn’t want—”

“To be captain?”

“Not at all. Not in the slightest bit. We both know that the captain can’t be part of the landing party. Listen, man, for Christ’s sake, I am not trying to usurp your captainly prerogatives and I most assuredly don’t want to be the next captain myself. I simply came down here to have a little preliminary discussion with you about the makeup of a possible landing party, and—”

“All right,” the year-captain says, as calmly as though they are discussing whether it is getting close to time for lunch. “So tell me who you think ought to be the ones to go.”

Huw, flustered and crimson-faced, says, “Why, you and me, of course. Me to drive the buggy, you to examine the biological situation. And Marcus or Innelda to work out the overall planetary analysis. That’s a big enough party to do the job, but not so big that we’d be putting an enormous proportion of the whole expedition at risk in one basket.”

The year-captain nods. But he says nothing. He sits there silently, inscrutable as ever. Perhaps he is considering the best reply to make to what Huw has said; perhaps he is simply sitting there with his mind blanked out in the proper Zen-monk fashion, allowing Huw to fidget. Indeed, Huw fidgets. Huw thinks he knows this man better than anyone else alive, and perhaps that is true. But, even so, he does not know him nearly well enough. He has transgressed on some inviolable boundary here, he realizes, but he is not sure what it is.

After a very long while the year-captain says, “You and me and Marcus. Or Innelda. All right. Certainly those are qualified personnel. And who is to become the next captain? Have you worked that out too?”

“Man, man, I don’t give a bloody damn who is captain! What I care about is the landing party! You and me, old brother, the way it was on Io, on Callisto, on Titan — !”

“Yes. You and me. And Marcus or Innelda. We agree on that. It’s a logical group, yes, Huw. But also we will need a new captain.” He smiles, but to Huw the smile seems no warmer than the landscape of Callisto or Ganymede. “We should hold the election immediately, I think. And then, once my successor is chosen, I’ll name the members of the landing party as my last act in office, and they will be the ones that you’ve proposed. You really want to go, do you, Huw?”

“Stop playing idiotic games with me. Of course I do!”

“Then find me a new year-captain,” the year-captain says.

At Lofoten I was taught how to put all vestiges of ego aside and live as a purely unattached entity, undistracted by irrelevant yearnings and schemes. And thereby to be a more perfect being, who will be more nearly likely to attain the dissolution of self that is the highest goal of the disciplined mind.

I absorbed the teachings fully, yes, I did, I did. Even though the nagging feeling remained in me that by trying to make myself perfectly unattached I was in fact acting out the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, because I was setting out to try to turn myself into a god, and what is that if not self-aggrandizement? I remember how my Preceptor smiled as I told him all that. Obviously he had been down the same path himself. It was, he said, the paradox of striving toward unstrivingness, a circular trap, and there was no way out of it except right through the middle of it. Scheme as hard as you can to free yourself of the need for scheming. Drive yourself ever onward toward liberation from the slavery of goals. Exert merciless self-discipline in the pursuit of freedom from compulsive achievement.

Well, so be it, I told myself. You are an imperfect being seeking to follow a course of perfection, and it’s altogether likely that you’ll hit a few problems along that way. I did my best, given the inherent limitations of the material I was required to work with, and by and large I think that the Lofoten experience got me closer to whatever it is that I’m searching for than anything I had previously done. But look at me now! Oh, just look! Where is all my nonattachment? Where is my freedom from fruitless and distracting striving?

I want to be part of the team that lands on Planet A.

I want it desperately. Desperately.