Starborne

How very peculiar, he thinks. This place is far less threatening than Venus, where the temperature at its mildest was as hot as an oven and one whiff of the atmosphere would have killed him in an instant, and he hadn’t felt a bit of this stuff there. The worst that could have happened to him on Venus was that he would die, after all, and though he was far from ready for dying, Huw quite clearly had understood ahead of time that he might be putting himself in harm’s way by going there. Likewise when he had visited Mercury, and Ganymede, and roaring volcanic Io, and all the rest of the uncongenial but fascinating worlds and worldlets that his ventures had taken him to. So why these sensations of — fear! — as he sits here, fully space-suited, inside the sealed snug-as-a-bug environment of this elegantly designed and sturdily constructed little spaceship?

It is almost time for extravehicular now. Huw steals a glance at Giovanna, cradled in the acceleration chair to his right, and at Marcus, on his other side. He can see only their faces. Neither one looks very cheerful. Marcus is frowning a little, but then, Marcus almost always frowns. Giovanna’s expression, too, might be a bit on the apprehensive side, and yet it might just be a look of deep concentration; no doubt she is contemplating the experiments she intends to carry out here.

Huw remains mystified at his own attack of edginess. Is that a droplet of sweat running down the tip of his nose? Yes, yes, that is what it seems to be. And another one trickling across his forehead. He appears to be doing quite a bit of perspiring. He is actually beginning to feel very poorly indeed.

Something I ate, maybe, he tells himself. My digestion is fundamentally sound but there is always the odd apple in the barrel, isn’t there?

“Well, now,” he says to Giovanna and to Marcus, and to everyone listening aboard the Wotan. “The moment has arrived for me to go out and claim this land in the name of Henry Tudor.”

He makes sure that his tone is a ringing, hearty one. His little private joke stirs no laughter among his companions. He doesn’t like that. And how curious, he thinks, that he needs towork at sounding hearty! He runs through one final suit-check and begins to set up the hatch-opening commands.

“When I go out,” he says, “you stay put right where you are until I call for you, all right? Let’s make sure I’m okay before anybody tries to join me. I’ll give the signal and you come out next, Giovanna. We check how that goes and then I’ll call for you, Marcus. Is that clear?”

They confirm that it is quite clear.

The hatch is open. Huw crawls through the lock, pauses for a moment, begins to descend the ladder in slow stately strides, trying to remember those lines of poetry about stout Cortez silent on that peak in Darien — feeling like some watcher of the skies, was it, when a new planet swims into his ken?

His left boot touches the surface of Planet A.

“Jesus Goddamn Christ!” Huw cries, a piercing anachronistic yawp that rips not only into the earphones of his fellow explorers but also, alas, into the annals of exploration as the first recorded statement of the first human visitor to an extrasolar planet.

“Huw, are you all right?” Giovanna asks from within, and he can hear the year-captain’s voice coming over the line from the Wotan, asking the same thing. It must have been one devil of a yell, Huw thinks.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying not to sound too shaky. “Turned my ankle a little when I put my foot down, that’s all.”

He completes the descent and steps away from the drone probe.

He is lying about his ankle and he is lying about feeling fine. He is, as a matter of fact, not feeling fine at all.

He is experiencing some sort of descent into the jaws of Hell.

The — uneasiness, anxiety, whatever it was — that he was feeling a few minutes ago on board the probe is nothing at all in comparison to this. The intensity of the discomfort has risen by several orders of magnitude — rose, actually, in the very instant that his boot touched the ground. It was the psychic equivalent of stepping on a fiery-hot metal griddle. And now he has passed beyond anxiety into some other kind of fear that is, perhaps, bordering on real terror. Panic, even.

These feelings are all completely new to him. He finds it almost as terrifying to realize that he is capable of being afraid as it is to be experiencing this intense fear.

Nor does Huw have any idea what it is that he might be afraid of. The fear is simplythere, a fact of existence, like his chin, like his left kneecap. It seems to be bubbling up out of the ground into him through his feet, passing up into his calves, his shins, his thighs, his groin, his gut.

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell—