He perceived this discussion as perfectly rational.
It was, however, interrupted by outbursts of egoizing not characteristic of the crew.
“If you’re going, go!” Shan said.
“Don’t give me orders,” Tai said.
“Somebody’s got to stay in control here,” Shan said.
“Not the men!” Tai said.
“Not the Terrans,” Karth said. “Have you people no self-respect?”
“Stress,” Gveter said. “Come on, Tai, Betton, all right, let’s go, all right?”
In the lander, everything was clear to Gveter. One thing happened after another just as it should. Lander operation is very
simple, and he asked Betton to take them down. The boy did so. Tai sat, tense and compact as always, her strong fists clenched
on her knees. Betton managed the little ship with aplomb, and sat back, tense also, but dignified: “We’re down,” he said.
“No, we’re not,” Tai said.
“It—it says contact,” Betton said, losing his assurance.
“An excellent landing,” Gveter said. “Never even felt it.” He was running the usual tests. Everything was in order. Outside
the lander ports pressed a brownish darkness, a gloom. When Betton put on the outside lights the atmosphere, like a dark fog,
diffused the light into a useless glare.
“Tests all tally with survey reports,” Gveter said. “Will you go out, Tai, or use the servos?”
“Out,” she said.
“Out,” Betton echoed.
Gveter, assuming the formal crew role of Support, which one of them would have assumed if he had been going out, assisted
them to lock their helmets and decontaminate their suits; he opened the hatch series for them, and watched them on the vid
and from the port as they climbed down from the outer hatch. Betton went first. His slight figure, elongated by the whitish
suit, was luminous in the weak glare of the lights. He walked a few steps from the ship, turned, and waited. Tai was stepping
off the ladder. She seemed to grow very short—did she kneel down? Gveter looked from the port to the vid screen and back.
She was shrinking? sinking—she must be sinking into the surface—which could not be solid, then, but bog, or some suspension
like quicksand—but Betton had walked on it and was walking back to her, two steps, three steps, on the ground which Gveter
could not see clearly but which must be solid, and which must be holding Betton up
because he was lighter—but no, Tai must have stepped into a hole, a trench of some kind, for he could see her only from the
waist up now, her legs hidden in the dark bog or fog, but she was moving, moving quickly, going right away from the lander
and from Betton.
“Bring them back,” Shan said, and Gveter said on the suit intercom, “Please return to the lander, Betton and Tai.” Betton
at once started up the ladder, then turned to look for his mother. A dim blotch that might be her helmet showed in the brown
gloom, almost beyond the suffusion of light from the lander.
“Please come in, Betton. Please return, Tai.”
The whitish suit flickered up the ladder, while Bet-ton’s voice in the intercom pleaded, “Tai—Tai, come back—Gveter, should
I go after her?”
“No. Tai, please return at once to lander.”
The boy’s crew-integrity held; he came up into the lander and watched from the outer hatch, as Gveter watched from the port.
The vid had lost her. The pallid blotch sank into the formless murk.
Gveter perceived that the instruments recorded that the lander had sunk 3.2 meters since contact with planet surface and was
continuing to sink at an increasing rate.
“What is the surface, Betton?”
“Like muddy ground—Where is she?”
“Please return at once, Tai!”
“Please return to
Shoby,
Lander One and all crew,” said the ship intercom; it was Tai’s voice. “This is Tai,” it said. “Please return at once to ship,
lander and all crew.”
“Stay in suit, in decon, please, Betton,” Gveter said. “I’m sealing the hatch.”
“But—All right,” said the boy’s voice.
Gveter took the lander up, decontaminating it and Betton’s suit on the way. He perceived that Betton and Shan came with him
through the hatch series into the
Shoby
and along the halls to the bridge, and that Karth, Sweet Today, Shan, and Tai were on the bridge.
Betton ran to his mother and stopped; he did not put
out his hands to her. His face was immobile, as if made of wax or wood.
“Were you frightened?” she asked. “What happened down there?” And she looked to Gveter for an explanation.
Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened.
Lost, he groped, lost, he found the word, the word that saved—”You—” he said, his tongue thick, dumb—”You called us.”
It seemed that she denied, but it did not matter. What mattered? Shan was talking. Shan could tell. “Nobody called, Gveter,”
he said. “You and Betton went out, I was Support; when I realized I couldn’t get the lander stable, that there’s something
funny about that surface, I called you back into the lander, and we came up.”
All Gveter could say was, “Insubstantial…”
“But Tai came—” Betton began, and stopped. Gveter perceived that the boy moved away from his mother’s denying touch. What
mattered?
“Nobody went down,” Sweet Today said. After a silence and before it, she said, “There is no down to go to.”
Gveter tried to find another word, but there was none. He perceived outside the main port a brownish, murky convexity, through
which, as he looked intently, he saw small stars shining.
He found a word then, the wrong word. “Lost,” he said, and speaking perceived how the ship’s lights dimmed slowly into a brownish
murk, faded, darkened, were gone, while all the soft hum and busyness of the ship’s systems died away into the real silence
that was always there. But there was nothing there. Nothing had happened. We are at Ve Port! he tried with all his will to
say; but there was no saying.
The suns burn through my flesh, Lidi said.
I am the suns, said Sweet Today. Not I, all is.
Don’t breathe! cried Oreth.
It is death, Shan said. What I feared, is: nothing.
Nothing, they said.
Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal
planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime.
In her cabined solitude, Lidi felt the gravity lighten to the half-G of the ship’s core-mass; she saw them, the nearer and
the farther suns, burn through the dark gauze of the walls and hulls and the bedding and her body. The brightest, the sun
of this system, floated directly under her navel. She did not know its name.
I am the darkness between the suns, one said.
I am nothing, one said.
I am you, one said.
You—one said—You—
And breathed, and reached out, and spoke: “Listen!” Crying out to the other, to the others, “Listen!”
“We have always known this. This is where we have always been, will always be, at the hearth, at the center. There is nothing
to be afraid of, after all.”
“I can’t breathe,” one said.
“I am not breathing,” one said.
“There is nothing to breathe,” one said.
“You are, you are breathing, please breathe!” said another.
“We’re here, at the hearth,” said another.
Oreth had laid the fire, Karth lit it. As it caught they both said softly, in Karhidish, “Praise also the light, and creation
unfinished.”
The fire caught with spark-spits, crackles, sudden flares. It did not go out. It burned. The others grouped round.
They were nowhere, but they were nowhere together; the ship was dead, but they were in the ship. A dead ship cools off fairly
quickly, but not immediately. Close the doors, come in by the fire; keep the cold night out, before we go to bed.
Karth went with Rig to persuade Lidi from her starry vault. The navigator would not get up. “It’s my fault,” she said.
“Don’t egoize,” Karth said mildly. “How could it be?”
“I don’t know. I want to stay here,” Lidi muttered. Then Karth begged her: “Oh, Lidi, not alone!”
“How else?” the old woman asked, coldly.
But she was ashamed of herself, then, and ashamed of her guilt trip, and growled, “Oh, all right.” She heaved herself up and
wrapped a blanket around her body and followed Karth and Rig. The child carried a little biolume; it glowed in the black corridors,
just as the plants of the aerobic tanks lived on, metabolizing, making an air to breathe, for a while. The light moved before
her like a star among the stars through darkness to the room full of books, where the fire burned in the stone hearth. “Hello,
children,” Lidi said. “What are we doing here?”
“Telling stories,” Sweet Today replied.
Shan had a little voice-recorder notebook in his hand.
“Does it work?” Lidi inquired.
“Seems to. We thought we’d tell… what happened,” Shan said, squinting the narrow black eyes in his narrow black face at the
firelight. “Each of us. What we—what it seemed like, seems like, to us. So that…”
“As a record, yes. In case … How funny that it works, though, your notebook. When nothing else does.”
“It’s voice-activated,” Shan said absently. “So. Go on, Gveter.”
Gveter finished telling his version of the expedition to the planet’s surface. “We didn’t even bring back samples,” he ended.
“I never thought of them.”
“Shan went with you, not me,” Tai said.
“You did go, and I did,” the boy said with a certainty that stopped her. “And we did go outside. And Shan and Gveter were
Support, in the lander. And I took samples. They’re in the Stasis closet.”
“I don’t know if Shan was in the lander or not,” Gveter said, rubbing his forehead painfully.
“Where would the Lander have gone?” Shan said.
“Nothing is out there—we’re nowhere—outside time, is all I can think—But when one of you tells how they saw it, it seems as
if it was that way, but then the next one changes the story, and I… ”
Oreth shivered, drawing closer to the fire.
“I never believed this damn thing would work,” said Lidi, bearlike in the dark cave of her blanket.
“Not understanding it was the trouble,” Karth said. “None of us understood how it would work, not even Gveter. Isn’t that
true?”
“Yes,” Gveter said.
“So that if our psychic interaction with it affected the process—”
“Or
is
the process,” said Sweet Today, “so far as we’re concerned.”
“Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to
believe
in it to make it work?”
“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said.
“No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I
know
some things. Enough to go on.”
“An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could
call it believing in the crew, or just
being
it—Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as … as transilient—as
being in the other place—the destination?”
“We lost our crewness, certainly, for a—Are there whiles?” Karth said. “We fell apart.”
“We lost the thread,” Shan said.
“Lost,” Oreth said meditatively, laying another massive, half-weightless log on the fire, volleying sparks up into the chimney,
slow stars.
“We lost—what?” Sweet Today asked.
No one answered for a while.
“When I can see the sun through the carpet…” Lidi said.
“So can I,” Betton said, very low.
“I can see Ve Port,” said Rig. “And everything. I can tell you what I can see. I can see Liden if I look. And my room on the
Oneblin.
And—”
“First, Rig,” said Sweet Today, “tell us what happened.”
“All right,” Rig said agreeably. “Hold on to me harder, maba, I start floating. Well, we went to the liberry, me and Asten
and Betton, and Betton was Elder Sib, and the adults were on the bridge, and I was going to go to sleep like I do when we
naffle-fly, but before I even lay down there was the brown planet and Ve Port and both the suns and everywhere else, and you
could see through everything, but Asten couldn’t. But I can.”
“We never went
anywhere,”
Asten said. “Rig tells stories all the time.”
“We all tell stories all the time, Asten,” Karth said.
“Not dumb ones like Rig’s!”
“Even dumber,” said Oreth. “What we need … What we need is … ”
“We need to know,” Shan said, “what transilience is, and we don’t, because we never did it before, nobody ever did it before.”
“Not in the flesh,” said Lidi.
“We need to know what’s—real—what happened,
whether
anything happened—” Tai gestured at the cave of firelight around them and the dark beyond it. “Where are we? Are we here?
Where is here? What’s the story?”
“We have to tell it,”’ Sweet Today said. “Recount it. Relate it…. Like Rig. Asten, how does a story begin?”
“A thousand winters ago, a thousand miles away,” the child said; and Shan murmured, “Once upon a time…”
“There was a ship called the
Shoby,”
said Sweet Today, “on a test flight, trying out the churten, with a crew of ten.
“Their names were Rig, Asten, Betton, Karth, Oreth, Lidi, Tai, Shan, Gveter, and Sweet Today. And they related their story,
each one and together….”
There was silence, the silence that was always there, except for the stir and crackle of the fire and the small sounds of
their breathing, their movements, until one of them spoke at last, telling the story.
“The boy and his mother,” said the light, pure voice, “were the first human beings ever to set foot on that world.”
Again the silence; and again a voice.
“Although she wished … she realized that she really hoped the thing wouldn’t work, because it would make her skills, her whole
life, obsolete … all the same she really wanted to learn how to use it, too, if she could, if she wasn’t too old to learn….”