Out of the heart a rapture,
Then a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
Life again.
—JOHN BANISTER TABB
*
They were not without memory, the creatures of the darkness, though their memory was strained and distorted by the years. They recalled a time, long ago, when they had walked the world, when they had breathed the air and basked in the glow of the sun and strode among the stars. And they remembered, vividly, a time when terrible convulsions had shaken the planet and the sun had quailed and the earth itself vomited fire, and nothing that lived had remained alive to walk the world's surface as the continents burned. And they remembered the blight caused by the light that couldn't be seen, and they remembered their escape into the darkness below. And they remembered their desperation.
Hopelessly they had clung to life, and somehow survived. But in the struggle, they had been changed—their spirit had darkened like their world, and their form had become something ghastly, an abomination that fed upon the bowels of the earth and could never return to the life above.
And yet they remembered their past. They remembered it, and the memory of it festered within them. Their hatred and despair and loneliness deepened, becoming as one spirit within them; and they themselves became as one spirit, one with their hatred—haunting their world of bitter, eternal night.
The buzzer was insistent, cutting through the silence of Chandra's meditation. She felt the cottony restful state come apart, dissolving to the sensation of her cabin surrounding her, the soft hangings stirring in the breeze of the ventilators. She let out her breath in a long sigh and brought her eyes back into focus. A light was winking on the com-station. She uncurled her legs and stepped off her bunk to answer the call.
"Burtak."
"Captain, this is Holloway. We've completed rendezvous with Endeavor and Columbia and are now proceeding in formation toward spiral-in orbit of Argus."
"Good. Contact Captains Fitzpatrick and Khumalo and ask them if they can shuttle over with their department heads."
"I did. They'll be here in two hours."
Chandra felt the corner of her mouth turn up in a smile. "Very well. I'll be on the bridge presently. I'm sure you'll have a summary of the latest developments with our alien friends."
"Of course. It's short, though."
"Anything I should know about now?"
"Nothing new. That's the summary."
Chandra sighed. "All right. I'll be there soon."
As the light went out, she crossed to the sitting alcove and drew a cup of boiling water over a tea bag. She picked up a hairbrush and ran it through her unbound hair a dozen times. Then she pinned up her hair with a few deft movements and sat down to sip her tea. Memories were coming back to her, filling her thoughts as they always did after her meditations, but today perhaps a little more painfully than usual . . .
She remembered her parents' reaction to her announcement that she was joining the first colony to the stars: her father's consternation and fear, her mother's sadness, and, much later, their pride. Her father had announced angrily that anyone who could so easily abandon her family heritage—leaving home never to return—had no claim to being his daughter; he knew that times changed, and he'd adjusted to a lot over the years, but if she chose to go through with this, then she could expect no part of the family inheritance. Not knowing whether to be angry or saddened by his outburst—after all, she was forty-two and had been commanding space vessels for years—she'd reminded him that there was no way for her to collect her inheritance anyway, from a distance of 130 light-years. Her brother was welcome to her share; she was going to inherit the stars instead.
How naive those words seemed now! Even at the time, they'd only angered her father. A few days later, however, she'd visited again to find him in his study, crying in shame; but much more time had passed before he'd managed to tell her—on the day of her departure—that he was deeply proud of her.
It had been much the same, many years earlier, when she'd broken with the family tradition and left the fabric business, not to marry but to enter the spaceflight academies. That decision had cost her, not only her family's approval, but also the only man she'd ever loved. How could a man play second fiddle to the stars? Since then, there had been precious little time for love. But who'd have guessed that she would one day be a ship's captain, much less commander of an entire star fleet?
Setting down her empty cup, she let the memories flee. She had other matters to concern her now. At last she was going to meet face-to-face again with the other captains; but it wasn't to have happened quite like this. She was to have been looking forward to a change in her job description—from commander of a fleet to administrator of three orbiting space stations as the majority of the colonists shuttled down to start new lives on a new world with newly elected leaders. Now, who knew? The landing might be postponed indefinitely.
She was eager to ask the advice of Khumalo and Fitzpatrick, but in fact she thought she already knew what they would say. The unease that she felt now was only likely to grow, and so were the questions. Why wouldn't the aliens answer her signals? And why had they withdrawn to encircle Argus . . . as though defending against an invasion?
* * *
From the observation cupola, Endeavor and Columbia looked like gigantic bridges floating in space—far enough away that they seemed to hover just out of reach against the stars, like fairyland bridges connecting one invisible world to another. Chandra leaned against the railing that skirted the clear dome and gazed at her fleet, together again after two years, ship-time; three and a half years, Earth-time. The last time she'd been able to do this had been on the outbound flight from Earth orbit. She'd almost forgotten how large the starships were; how beautiful the stars were to the naked eye—clustered jewels against the darkness.
The domes throughout the ship had been sealed off during the FTL passage; now, open again, they were popular gathering spots for the colonists and crew. Chandra enjoyed the prerogative of occupying the bridge cupola alone. She felt somehow that she might make her own special peace with this solar system and its mysteries if she only meditated on the sight long enough.
Argus' sun was blocked from view by her ship, but the planet itself, their intended home-to-be, was visible now as a bluish-white dot. From the bridge, with Aggie's enhanced displays, she could have had far more information about the planet; but from here, even through the telescope mounted on the railing, Argus was a pristine world, lacking such complications as a fleet of silent, enigmatic aliens.
"Chandra—Endeavor reports her captain's launch away," she heard from the intercom.
"Thanks." Chandra turned the telescope to see if she could spot the craft. There it was—a tiny silver glint. She watched it for a moment, then capped and secured the telescope. Time to descend to the bridge, to see the launches safely into Aleph's hangar; time to greet her colleagues.
* * *
"Roger, you haven't changed a bit! Welcome aboard!" She met Captain Fitzpatrick and his officers midway across the hangar deck.
"And you're as beautiful as ever—sir!" Fitzpatrick kissed her hand solemnly, then saluted with a grin. "Permission to come aboard?"
"Granted, granted, and granted!" Chandra returned his salute and shook hands all around. "Welcome, all of you!"
Fitzpatrick was informally dressed, as always, in a turtleneck shirt and a uniform jacket. His curly red hair was a bit wilder and a bit thinner than she remembered. "Am I first to arrive? Isn't Khumalo here yet?"
"He's on his way." Chandra pointed to a display screen. "There he is, coming into Hangar Two right now."
* * *
"Chandra, greetings! And Roger!"
"Wonderful to see you, Khumalo!"
"Welcome aboard, you old Zulu!" Fitzpatrick exclaimed, striding forward, oblivious to the startled gazes of the crew.
"Please!" Captain Themba Khumalo cried. "You know perfectly well I am not a Zulu! My forebears were Swazi and—"
"Who cares, you idiot?" Fitzpatrick bellowed. He seized Khumalo's hand and then gave him a great backslapping bear hug.
Khumalo stepped back, grinning from ear to ear. He was a tiny man with jet-black skin, short bristly hair, and gleaming eyes. He was resplendent in a crimson dress uniform with gold epaulets. "Roger pulls my leg and I pull back," he said to Chandra. "But when I pull his leg, it comes off in my hand!"
Chandra laughed and turned to greet Columbia's other officers. "We'll be having dinner in the officers' lounge. I hope you're all hungry, and ready to shake a lot of hands. But I'm afraid we're going to have to get down to business very shortly. We have a lot to discuss."
"Indeed we do," Fitzpatrick said. "Whether Themba is going to let me win back what he stole from me in poker, for one."
"Amazing," Khumalo said, shaking his head. "All this time and he still remembers a perceived injustice. Astonishing."
Chandra shook her head and pointed the way. "Enjoy it while you can, you two."
* * *
"Really, as I see it, there's no choice," Khumalo said softly. "Chandra is right. As much as I hate to send any crew out with so little protection, I see no other way—except to risk thousands of lives rather than a dozen or two."
The moke- and teapots were both empty, and the brandy snifters nearly so. The three captains had retired for a private discussion immediately following a reunion dinner with the other officers. Chandra had laid out her ideas, hoping that Khumalo or Fitzpatrick would have better ones.
"Roger? Do you agree?"
Fitzpatrick ran his fingers back through his thinning hair, grimacing. "Agree? Sure, I agree. I just wish—" He sighed and slapped his thigh. "I wish we had something to go on. It's damned frustrating, not knowing if we should be getting ready to fight—or flee—or sit down to dinner with them. If they even eat dinner."
"Well, we've no place to flee to, in any case," Khumalo said.
"True enough," Chandra agreed. "In my opinion, we can only go forward and try to find out who they are, what they want, and how they're going to react to our presence. And since our combined science departments haven't been able to tell us much more than that there might have been stardrive activity—"
"Let's do it, Chandra," Fitzpatrick said. "What else can we do?"
"Very well, then. We'll send my landing scout number one. Its first priority will be to observe the alien fleet around Argus. If it appears safe, if there's no interference, I may order them to go for the landing. But information about the visitors is paramount."
"And we'll continue in on a slow spiral orbit?" Khumalo asked.
"Unless I hear a better idea. We'll approach, but slowly enough to let them get used to the idea."
"What about the crew? Have you picked anyone yet?" Fitzpatrick asked.
Chandra closed her eyes and felt a great weight settle upon her. "No," she whispered. She opened her eyes. "I'll be calling for volunteers."
"Of course," Khumalo murmured. He relaxed slightly and smiled. "I envy them the opportunity."
* * *
"The landing director should at least have the chance to see it." Tony had insisted. "He can say no if he doesn't like the idea."
That's what he had said to his immediate supervisor, who had wondered why DeWeiler and Mung were devoting so much time to a project that wasn't even on the roster, when there was so much else to be done in preparation for planetfall. Tony had explained patiently that they'd done the project in addition to their regular work; and anyway, they'd only been pursuing a logical extension of prior research. Eventually he'd gotten a hearing with the head of the department, who had watched the demonstration in stoic silence and gone to tell the landing director. It was the landing director who'd brought the captain to take a look.
"Why do you call them nobblies?" Captain Burtak asked Mung as she watched them set up the apparatus.
"Well," Mung said nervously, "it's really—" He hesitated, his mouth open. "Actually . . ."
"It doesn't really mean anything," Tony said. He cleared his throat. His voice got loud when he was nervous. "Our first samples looked like knobbed clusters of plant cells under the microcam, and that's where we got the name. The newer ones don't look that way so much."
"So," the captain said. "What exactly have you done?"
"Well, what we've done is not actually that new," Tony said carefully. "We've extended some research that was done a number of years ago in Australia, by—"
"Please. Give me the short version."
"Uh, yes. We've used molecular-size engineering units to invade and modify certain sensitive plant cells." Tony touched a metal bottle, a standard molecular-cybernetic experimentation canister. The nobblie cells were isolated in the bottle, in a controlled environment. "We've altered the plants' responses—tropisms, that is—to a sort of tunable telepathic receptivity."
"Yes?" The captain appeared unimpressed. "And how will that help us—if we take them along on the scout, as you suggest?"
"Well, you see, the molecyber units remain inside the plant cells, like organelles," Tony said quickly. "And they not only do the interior tuning, they also transmit what the plant cells feel, if I can use that term, to a receiver on the outside." He paused. The captain was gazing at him silently. "My first—our first—thought was that they could act as a sort of long-range sentient life detector on the planet. On Argus. But now, with these others on the scene—the aliens, I mean—I thought that if we ever got close enough to them, the nobblies might help give us some indication of what they're about, if you know what I mean. Some sense of their intentions."
The captain nodded, finger pressed to her lips. "May I see it work?"
"Yes, of course. Mung, do you want to handle the subjects? Perhaps if someone went with him to make the selection . . ."
The landing director sent an aide out of the room with Mung, while Tony sat and adjusted a small headset to his temples. "Now we wait," he explained. The captain raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch. He fiddled with the gain and at once felt a sleepy sort of awareness in his mind, something vaguely like a gnostic presence in rap, but drowsier. Within it was an awareness of him, and of the captain and the others, expectant and somewhat skeptical. He adjusted the gnostic relay to filter all of that out, and he waited.
The wait was not long. He felt an itch in his forebrain, and he sat up, trying to open himself to whatever the nobblies were picking up. He felt a rumble of contentment, and his nose twitched, and he was aware of a puzzling mixture of odors, until he realized that he was taking inventory of the various smells of the biolab. "Cat," he said a moment later. "Feeling kind of lazy." He closed his eyes, absorbing the feelings.
"Cat it is," the landing director said.
Tony turned around. Mung and the aide were approaching. Draped over Mung's arm was Fangora, one of the lab cats, purring with contented indifference.
"What's it feel like?" the captain asked.
"Like I was in his fur. If he'd been feeling, say, feisty, I would have felt that." As Tony spoke, he felt a flush of energy and turned back toward Fangora. The cat, apparently deciding he had had enough, jumped out of Mung's arms and scampered away.
Captain Burtak's eyebrows went up again. "You felt that coming?" Tony nodded. "And how reliable is this procedure? If you did not know this animal already, would you be able to pick it out so easily?"
"It would be more difficult," Tony admitted. "There is a subjective process of learning to recognize different kinds of responses. Mung, can you find something that we haven't tried yet?"
Mung nodded. "This one will be tougher," he promised, leaving the room.
"I'm not saying that this will give us everything we'd like," Tony said. "But suppose we had a face-to-face meeting. It might tell us whether their intent was aggressive or friendly—possibly before we could tell from overt behavior." A moment later he felt an itch again, but this time it was more like the tingle of tiny static discharges than a real presence. He turned up the gain. The tingle became a buzz. Blank your thoughts. What is it? Many tiny buzzings combined: a confusion of hunting and seeking. "Insects?" he said.
He turned. Mung walked into the room holding a sealed osmotic cage. Inside, a cloud of tiny pollenator flies were batting themselves against the sides of the cage. Tony removed the headset. "That," he said, "was a very strange feeling." He looked up at the captain. "Would you like to try it, sir?"
The captain arched her eyebrows and took the headset.
* * *
"You understand, DeWeiler, that this is classed as a high-risk mission? Your friend Mr. Ting might be disappointed at not being included—but he might also live longer than you." Tony nodded, swallowing, as he stood before the landing director's desk. "I'm sending you, frankly, because I'm not sure anyone else could learn to use it in the time we have before launch."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. I'm not making this choice lightly. If our friends out there turn out to be not so friendly, you might never get close enough to even turn your nobblies on. If you do make it through their fleet and actually land, you'll have your hands full—and Commander Mortaine will be expecting a lot more out of you than just operating this machine. Understood?"
Tony felt his smile turn to a hard-lipped acknowledgment. "I understand, sir. When do I report to the scout ship?"
"Eighteen hundred hours today. Can you be ready?"
"Absolutely, sir."
"Good. Then get the hell out of here and start packing."
* * *
Chandra watched from within soft-rap as the landing scout floated out of Aleph's belly and accelerated toward Argus. Thirty-two volunteers were aboard that scout, including its commander, Jensen Mortaine, one of her best officers. She hoped she was not sending him, all of them, into senseless danger. Whatever happens, and whomever you're going to meet, I admire your courage, she thought. But the risk being borne by the scout crew was no greater than that of the rest of the fleet; it was just coming a little sooner. This fleet was on a one-way mission, with three thousand men, women, and children: scientists, farmers, engineers, teachers, carpenters, masons, medics, and more—plus hundreds of species of plants and animals. They were here to settle a world, and there was little room for alternate plans. One way or another, they were going to have to make an accommodation with the alien fleet.
Perhaps, she thought, Mortaine would be presiding over the long-awaited first contact with friendly beings from the stars. Perhaps the worry was all for nothing. Perhaps.
She reflected upon her meeting with Captains Fitzpatrick and Khumalo. It had been a pleasure, and far too short. The need for decision-making had left little time for catching up—though Themba had somehow found the time to beat Roger twice more at poker. The two had returned to their ships to continue preparations for the encounter; it was unlikely that they would have the chance to meet again before landfall.
A great deal could happen between now and then. A great deal, indeed.