Starborne

They are in the air now. Heading eastward, flying at an altitude of a thousand kilometers, crossing a calm gray-green ocean with an almost waveless surface that has a curiously greasy look. Night begins to descend around them, and very quickly they are in darkness. This planet has no moon. The stars, against that pure black backdrop, are nearly as intense in their gleaming as they would be in space. Huw, studying the sky, tries to arrange the unfamiliar patterns into constellations. That one, he thinks, is something like a tree with huge feathery branches, and he traces another outline that strikes him as reminiscent of a dog’s head, and another that seems to be a warrior about to throw a spear. He tries to point these figures out to Giovanna, but she is unable to see them no matter how carefully he directs her to the key stars, and gradually Huw loses them himself in the general confusion of the bright cosmic clutter.

The probe is over land again. A greenish dawn is breaking. Huw assumes manual control and searches for a good place to bring them down.

This continent is one big desert, a sea of orange dunes. Perhaps it doesn’t radiate nightmare waves like the continent in the western hemisphere, but it doesn’t look like a very good bet for settlement all the same. From the air Huw sees nothing that might be a river, a lake, even a stream — just sand and more sand, and squat flat-topped hills separating one cluster of dunes from another, and some isolated patches of dismal scrubby vegetation. Still, he has come here for the purpose of finding out something particular about this side of the planet, and he intends to follow through on that intention.

Huw sets the probe down carefully in a windswept area where the dunes have been pushed aside, and begins the hatch-opening procedure. But already the wrongness of this world is manifesting itself once more upon them, here in the first instants of their second landfall. He can feel the icy, invisible skeletal fingers scrabbling at his brainstem again, the queasiness expanding in his gut, the conviction that a web of some constricting fabric is being woven around his heart.

There is a curse on this filthy place, he tells himself.

He glances over at Giovanna. She nods. She’s feeling it too.

“Let’s go outside anyway,” Huw says.

“What for?”

“To say that we did. Come on.”

Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make actual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upward at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world: huge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, batlike beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.

There is nothing in the sky. No monsters. Not even a cloud.

He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned odor of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is definitely choking.

He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his faceplate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible planet.

It is cold, harsh, thin air, the kind of air that Mars would have, perhaps, if Mars had any air at all. There is a disagreeable medicinal undertaste to it, bitter stuff: some unfamiliar trace element, no doubt, present in a quantity larger than Huw is accustomed to getting in his air. But he sucks it in anyway in great sighing gusting intakes of breath.

Giovanna is looking at him worriedly. “Why are you doing that?” she asks.

Huw doesn’t want to say anything to her about airborne monsters, about huge rough-skinned wings clamping remorselessly down over his head to cut off his intake of air. He simply says, “I’ve come a long distance to get here. I want to breathe the air of another world before I leave.”

“And if breathing it is dangerous?”

“Marcus was breathing it,” Huw says. “It’s just air. Oxygen and nitrogen and CO₂and some other things. What danger can there be in that?”

“Marcus is dead now.”

“Not from breathing the air,” says Huw. But after a couple of further inhalations he fastens his faceplate again. His sampling of the atmosphere of Planet A leaves an unpleasant chemical aftertaste in his nostrils and throat, but he suspects that there’s little significance to that, if any: for all he knows, it’s mere imagination, just another of Planet A’s cheery psychic tricks, one more turn of the screw.