Starborne

Though Huw is definitely in charge, and can override anything at any moment, the real work of calculating the landing orbit is being done by the Wotan’s drive intelligence. That’s only common sense. The intelligence knows how such things are done, and its reaction time is a thousand times quicker than Huw’s. So he watches, now and then nodding approvingly, as the landing operation unfolds. They are coming down near the coast of the least parched of the four desertlike continents. The climate appears to be the most temperate here, milder than in the interior and, so it would seem, blessed with somewhat higher precipitation levels. Huw is planning a trek to the ocean shore to try to get a reading on what sort of marine life, if any, this place may have.

The ground, visible a few hundred kilometers below, seems pretty scruffy here, though: dry buff-brown fields, isolated patches of low contorted shrubs, a few minor blunt-nosed rocky outcroppings, but nothing in the way of really interesting geological formations. To the east, low hills are evident. Planet A does not appear to have much in the way of truly mountainous country. To Huw the landscape looks elderly and a little on the tired side. It is a flattened, eroded landscape, well worn, one that has been sitting out here doing nothing very much for a very long time.

Not really a promising place to found New Earth, he thinks. But we are here, and we will see what there is to see.

“Touchdown,” he tells the year-captain, sitting up there 20,000 kilometers away in the control cabin of the Wotan, as the drone makes a nice unassisted landing right in the heart of a large, broad, shallow bowl-shaped formation, perhaps the crater of some ancient cosmic collision, set in a great dry plateau.

The landscape, Huw observes, does not seem all that wondrously Earthlike when viewed at very close range. The sky has a faint greenish tinge. The position of the sun is not quite what he would expect it to be: out of true by a few degrees of arc, just enough to be bothersome. The only living things in sight are little clumps of yellow-headed shrubs arrayed here and there around the sides of this sloping basin; they have peculiar jet-black corkscrew-twist trunks and oddly jutting branches, and they, too, seem very thoroughly otherworldly. Even the way they are situated is strange, for they grow in long, right elliptical rings, perhaps a hundred bushes to each ring, and each ring spaced in remarkable equidistance from its neighbors. As though this is a formal garden of some weird sort. But this is a desert, on an apparently uninhabited world, not anybody’s garden at all. Something feels wrong to him about these spacing patterns.

The surrounding rock formations, jagged black pyramidal spires fifty or sixty meters high, have the same nonspecific wrongness. They announce, however subtly, that they have undergone processes of formation and erosion that are not quite the same as those the rocks of Earth have experienced.

It is understood that Huw will be the first one to step outside. He is the master explorer; he is the captain of this little ship; this is his show, from first to last. He is eager to get outside, too, to clamber down that ladder and sink his boots into this extrasolar turf and utter whatever the first words of the first human visitor to a world of another star are going to be. But he is too canny an explorer to rush right out there, however eager he may be. There are housekeeping details to look after first. Determination and recording of their exact position, external temperature readings to take, geophysical soundings to make sure that the ship has not been set down in some precarious unstable place and will fall over the moment he starts to climb out of it, and so forth and so forth. All of that takes close to an hour.

While this is going on Huw notices, after a time, that he has started to feel a little odd.

Uneasy. Queasy. Even a little creepy, maybe.

These are unusual feelings for him. Huw is a robust and ebullient man, to whom such sensations as dismay and apprehension and disquietude and agitation are utterly foreign. He is generally prudent and circumspect, useful traits in one who finds his greatest pleasure in entering unfamiliar and dangerous places, but a tendency toward anxiety is not part of his psychological makeup.

He feels a good deal of anxiety now. He knows that what he feels can be called anxiety, because there is a strange knot in the pit of his stomach, and a curious lump has appeared in his throat that makes swallowing difficult, and he has read that these feelings are symptoms of anxiety, which is a species of fear. Up until now he has never experienced these symptoms, not that he can recall, nor has he experienced very much in the way of any other sort of fear, either.