Joan Vinge: Heaven Chronicles

More faintly, a door slammed shut. Chaim let her image back into his mind, grinned at it, rueful. Well, your friendship is better than nothing, poor Goody Two-Shoes.…

But he saw little more of her, as a friend or in any other way, for the next four and a half megaseconds; their mutual dislike of Siamang, and fear of provoking him, still came between them, an impassable barrier.

Until finally Planet Two filled the viewscreen: alien, immense, a painter's palette in sterile grays—gray-blue, gray-green, gray-brown. A castaway's grateful voice filled the speaker static; tracing his radio fix, Mythili put them into a polar orbit, breaking the hypnotic flow of grays with the blinding whiteness of ice caps. For the first time, Chaim saw clouds—pale, wispy streamers of frozen water vapor trapped high in the planet's atmospheric layer. He recorded it all, and was filled with a rare wonder at being one of the few human beings in Heaven system ever to have seen it firsthand. It occurred to him that the clouds seemed more numerous than he remembered from pictures: he managed to make intelligent conversation about it, standing at Mythili's side. And, as they made final preparations to enter the ungainly craft that would take them down out of orbit, she asked him quietly to assist her in the landing.

He sat strapped into the heavily padded seat beside her own in the cabin that seemed cramped even to him. Siamang sat behind him, apparently sober, surprisingly silent. Chaim studied Mythili's movements, saw his own nervousness reflected in her face, but making her movements sharper, more certain, as though it only augmented her skill. She freed them from the grasp of the parent ship, executed the first rocket burn that broke them out of their orbit … and began the descent maneuver that neither she nor any living pilot in Heaven system had ever done, with the exception of the man stranded below.

They entered the upper atmosphere; she began the second burn. She would have to maintain a crucial balance: too swift a rate of descent would result in their destruction … but too slow a one would exhaust the ship's fuel resources while they were still high above the surface. No ships had been constructed for over two billion seconds in the Heaven system that were capable of using a planet's atmosphere to slow their descent—because since the war there had never been a need for such a ship. Until now: No nuclear electric rocket could produce the acceleration necessary for a planetary landing. And so this ship, which could provide the necessary thrust to slow their descent, had been constructed of makeshift parts and with makeshift technology, in scarcely two megaseconds' time.

Chaim read off their altitude and rate of descent from instruments that had never been calibrated for second-to-second precision at six hundred meters per second; clutched the instrument panel with sweating hands, fighting against his own sudden, unaccustomed weight. Mythili dropped them down toward the signal of the radio beacon, the viewscreen virtually useless, blocked by the intermittent glare of their rockets and the angle of their descent. She bit off a gasp, or a curse, each time they were buffeted or swept from the line of their trajectory by the terrifying force of the unseen atmospheric turbulence.

And at a thousand meters, she began the final burn. Chaim raised his voice as the sound of the rockets reached them, growing: “… six hundred meters, twenty meters per second, five hundred meters—” he felt thrust increase, “—four hundred meters, eighteen meters per second … three hundred meters … two hundred … one hundred meters, ten meters per second …” She cut thrust again, their rate of descent stabilized. “… fifty meters, ten meters per second … forty meters … thirty … twenty meters … Mythili, we're—” She increased thrust to full; ten meters per second squared crushed him down into his seat. The viewscreen was blind with dust. The ship lurched, noise drowned his words, vibration rattled his teeth, “—too fast!”

Impact jarred through him, almost an anticlimax. Mythili cut power; seconds passed before the silence registered. He blinked at the screen, still swirling gray, and pushed up in his seat against gravity's unfamiliar hand. “Congratulations—” he laughed, finding himself breathless, “it's a planet … And I didn't get a single damned shot of the whole descent!”

She drooped, triumphant, laughing with him. “If you'd been filming instead of being my copilot, I don't think we'd be here to worry about it.”

He bobbed his head. “Too kind—” touched her with his eyes. She held his gaze, smiling.

“Is it my imagination, or is it getting cold in here?” Dartagnan watched his breath frost as he spoke. He struggled with his spacesuit, feeling leaden and clumsy. He heard Siamang swear in irritation in the cramped space behind him.

“It's not your imagination—the atmosphere acts like water, it's conducting all our heat away right through the hull.” Mythili massaged her arms as she studied the viewscreen. “Siamang's engineers predicted something like this.”

Chaim saw the dome of the abandoned experimental station, nearly a kilometer away across the flat, subpolar plain; and closer in, the ungainly bulk of the prospector's ship. Both of us made a better landing than we had a right to.… Beyond them both, along the incredibly distant horizon, he thought he saw a dusting of pale snow pocked with broad, shallow craters: the south-polar icecap of Planet Two. He imagined the incredible volatile resources this world represented; remembered abruptly that they were all at the bottom of a gravity well.

“Come on, Red. Get your camera and let's get going. This is what we came for!” Siamang's voice was good natured, eager. Chaim felt a surge of relief, hoping Siamang's professional business dealings would be easier to record than his private life.

“Coming, boss … Aren't you coming?” He looked back at Mythili. “Walking on a planet isn't something everybody's done—”

She nodded. “I know. But I have to stay with the ship; it's not very well designed to deal with the effects of an atmosphere. I have to keep the cabin warm enough so that the instruments don't freeze, and enough fuel has to be bled from the tanks so that they don't rupture. And besides,” she lowered her voice, “I stay out of corporate business dealings.”

“Oh. Well, I'll show you my home movies when I get back.” He settled his helmet onto his head, latched it, picked up his camera. He staggered, stunned by its weight. The surface gravity of Planet Two was over a hundred times normal: He suddenly wished he'd accepted the corporation's offer of a lightweight prewar camera, instead of insisting on his own.

“Come on , Red!”

He followed Siamang through the lock and down the precarious rungs of the ladder. The atmospheric pressure kept his suit from ballooning; it clutched him as he moved, with hands of ice.

“Damn it!” Siamang stumbled sideways, struck by an invisible blow: wind, Dartagnan realized, as it shoved him roughly back against the side of the ship. His helmet rang on metal. The surface air had been calm when they set down, but the wind was rising now, swirling the blue-gray dust into translucent curtains. Between the gusts he caught sight of a tiny figure starting toward them from the dome.

They struggled out across the shallow, flame-fused dish of the ship's landing area, went on across the fine, loose surface of the dust. “We're real dirt-siders now, boss,” he said cheerfully, more cheerfully than he felt. Dust sandblasted his faceplate; he shut his eyes against it, beginning to sweat, already shivering. Siamang didn't answer, as he struggled to keep his footing; his face was grim, barely visible behind his helmet glass. Dartagnan looked up at the sky, the spinel sun grown large against an alien ultramarine blue. He thought of sapphire, the only thing he could remember that possessed the same purity of color. They should have named it Blue instead of Two … Blue Hell. He looked down again, across the blue-gray plain at the dome, hardly larger, and at the suited figure closing with them now, proof that they were actually making headway. He let his camera slip off of his stiffening shoulder, wrapped the strap around a numb, gloved hand.