Starborne

“So Marcus is dead, much too soon. So be it. So be it. He is beyond all pain now, beyond all uncertainties and insufficiencies, all knowledge of failure and defeat now. In that we should find comfort. But also we must see to it, friends — for our own sakes, not his — that Marcus’s death was not without purpose. We must go on, and on and on and on if need be, from one end of the cosmos to the other, if we must, to find the world that we are to settle. And when we get there — and wewill get there — we must see to it that our children and our children’s children remember always the name of Marcus, the first of the martyrs of our enterprise, who gave his life so that their world could be. When we write the histories of our voyage, the name of Marcus will be written in letters of fire. We will make Marcus immortal that way. As all of us will be immortal — glorious figures of myth, demigods, even gods, perhaps — in the minds of the people of that new world. We who are without gods to pray to ourselves will become gods, I think, to the settlers of the new Earth of the years to come. Immortal gods, all of us. And Marcus has simply entered his immortality earlier than the rest of us, that’s all.”

Again he pauses. Looks from face to face. Too grand? he wonders. Too high-flown?

But everyone is utterly silent and still; everyone’s eyes are on him, even the blind eyes of Noelle. He has captured them. As in the old days, the Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. Yes. A successful performance, one of his best. Perhaps even accomplishing something useful.

Good. Quit while you’re ahead, he thinks.

He says in a different tone of voice, a sudden downward shift of rhetorical intensity, “One thing more, and then we’ll break this up. This afternoon we’ll begin calculating the course for our next shunt, which will take us — what is it, Hesper, eighty light-years? ninety? — to another possible colony-world. Actual departure time will be announced later. Naturally, I have no idea whether this second destination is going to work out any better than the first one did. We’re simply going to go out there and have a look, just as we did here. At this point we have no particular expectations, one way or the other. Of course, I hope that it’s the world we’re seeking, and I know you all feel the same way. But there are others waiting to be explored beyond that one, if need be, and, if need be, we will go onward until we find what we want. I thank you all for listening. Meeting dismissed.”

Paco, Hesper, Julia, Sieglinde, Roy, and Heinz begin the process of working out the course that will take the Wotan to Planet B. The year-captain goes off with Noelle to send the communiqué to Earth that will report on the failure of the mission to Planet A and the death of Marcus.

He is worried about the effect that such news will have on the people of Earth. The people of Earth are accustomed to success. For them, he thinks, this voyage is a sort of fairy-tale adventure, and fairy tales are supposed to have benign outcomes, even though the occasional wicked witch may be met with along the way. The fact that one of the adventurers has actuallydied from his encounter with some dark magical force may not fit the pattern that they expect to be enacted out here. They may insulate themselves from further jolts, he fears, by retreating from their Interest in the Wotan’s voyage, by decoupling themselves entirely from their involvement in the enterprise.

Still, they have to be told. It would be wrong to withhold the truth from them. They know that a planetary landing has been made; they must be allowed to know the outcome of it.

“How is transmission quality today?” he asks Noelle.

“Some interference. Not too serious.”

“All right, then. Are you ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing personnel … deplorable fatal accident … immediate withdrawal from planetary surface … abandonment of exploration effort … It’s all true, but it sounds terrible. He tries to soften it a little, improvising as he reads, inserting little phrases like “hopeful first attempt” and “encouraging to have found so Earthlike a planet, whatever its drawbacks, so quickly.” He speaks of their coming departure for Planet B and his optimistic sense that the galaxy is so replete with worlds of the appropriate size, temperature range, and atmosphere that there can be hardly any doubt at all of the forthcoming discovery of an adequate planet for settlement.

There. Let them chew on that for a while.