Starborne

“But let’s see how it goes for us when we’re outside, shall we?”

A little comedy surrounds their going outside the ship. The year-captain, having previously made it clear that he looks upon Huw as the leader of the party, indicates with a nod that he will defer to Huw in the matter of being the first to set foot on this planet. But Huw, who has been the first to set foot on one extrasolar planet already, is quite willing to let the year-captain have the honor on this one, and defers right back to him. Of course, there is the possibility that the first one outside the ship will be the recipient of some sort of disagreeable jolt, but each man, in his deference to the other, goes to some length to make it clear that such fear is definitely not an item in his considerations, not at all. Courtesy is the only issue.

“Goon,” the year-captain says irritably in the end.

“Well, then. Yes, if so you say.”

Huw shimmies through the hatch and cautiously steps down onto the charred, still faintly sizzling surface of the landing area that he has fashioned. There is a slight resilience, a little give, beneath his weight. He can detect no untoward psychological effects.

“Everything all right so far,” he announces.

The year-captain joins him. Together they walk toward the edge of the clearing; and then, after just a moment of hesitation, they step out together onto the upper surface of one of the unburned vines.

It is an unappealing surface. Big scrofulous leaves, blue-black and stemless, pocked with ugly blister-shaped air bladders, sprout directly from the wood at sparse intervals. Dull red streamers hang from their edges like bursts of entrails. In the bare places between the leaves the trunks of the vine have a disagreeably gluey texture.

“Well?” Huw asks.

“A little sticky, isn’t it?”

“I mean your mind.”

“Still functioning, thank you. And yours?”

“I was ready to scream by this point on Planet A. Alreadywas screaming a little, as a matter of fact. Things are different here, it seems. So much for Giovanna’s theory, let’s hope.”

“Vile place even so, isn’t it?” the year-captain says.

“Utterly repugnant. Absolute trumps, as repugnant goes. Shall we move a little farther onward, old brother?”

It is almost like being under water. By their calculations it’s the midday hour, with a medium-size sun hovering right above them just a few dozens of millions of kilometers away, and yet they are shrouded in a deep twilight gloom. There is one place in the sky where a somewhat lighter blurry patch stands out against the thick gray mantle of clouds: that’s the sun lurking back there, no doubt. The rain, falling as it does in dense sheets, is dispiriting in the extreme. It must not have stopped raining here in millions of years. The water hits the corrugated woody surfaces of the huge vines and goes slithering off into the narrow crevices between them. Perhaps some of it trickles downward from the planetary surface for hundreds of kilometers until it comes to rest in pockets of unimaginable darkness along the flat face of the rocky core; but most of the deluge simply bounces right back up in instant evaporation. All about them they can see heavy clouds of vapor climbing stubbornly through the furious vertical scything of the downpour.

The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent outgrowths it is possible to see numerous large oval bodies, greenish in color and smooth in texture, set in the bark of the vines four or five meters apart from one another like a host of unblinking eyes: they appear to have a significant function for the vines, perhaps supplementary instruments that aid the strange leaves in conducting some kind of photosynthetic process in this dismal subaqueous light.

Everything here seems to be rotting, decaying, decomposing, and reconstituting itself all in the same process. This world would have made a good penal colony, maybe, in the fine old days when cruel and unusual punishment was a popular human pastime. But it doesn’t seem good for very much else.

“Have we seen enough, do you think?” Huw says.